
Qass. 
Book. 



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5-7 



TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY 
IN THE CEVENNES. 



Travels with a Donkey 

libhary 

,jWAR 21 mo 
EHIMEBB. , 

THE CEVENNES. 



BY 



-S 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 



BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1888. 






By TransfpT 
JUN 5 i^U? 



Cambridge : 
University Press : John Wilson & Son. 



MY DEAR SIDNEY COLVIN, 

The journey which this little book is to describe was 
very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth 
beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we 
are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilder- 
ness of this world, — /all, too, travellers with a donkey ; 
and the best that we find in our travels is an honest 
friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We 
travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the 
reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves ; and, 
when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent. 

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter 
to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his 
meaning ; they find private messages, assurances of love, 
and expressions of gratitude dropped for them in every 
corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays 
the postage. Yet, though the letter is directed to all, we 
have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the 
outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not 
proud of his friends ? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, 
it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours, 

R. L. S. 



CONTENTS, 



>J*ic 



VELAY. 

PACB 

The Donkey, the Pack, and the Pack-Saddle i i 

The Green Donkey-Driver 22 

I have a Goad 40 



UPPER GEVAUDAN. 

A Camp in the Dark 55 

Cheylard and Luc 76 

OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS. 

Father Apollinaris 87 

The Monks 97 

The Boarders 112 

UPPER GEVAUDAN {continued^. 

A Night among the Pines 124 

Across the Goulet 127 



Consents. 



THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS. 



PAGB 



Across the Lozere 147 

Pont de Montvert 158 

In the Valley of the Tarn 171 

Florac 191 

In the Valley of the Mimente 197 

The Heart of the Country 206 

The Last Day 221 

Farewell, Modestine 232 



VELAY. 



* Many are the mighty things^ and 

nought is vtore mighty than 
man. . . . He masters by his 
devices the tejtant of the fields. ' 
— Antigone. 

* Who hath loosed the bands of the 

wild ass? ' — Job. 



IWAir 29 \iibb 

VELAY. 



THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE 
PACK-SADDLE. 

In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleas- 
ant highland valley fifteen miles from Le Ptiy^ 
I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier 
is notable for the making of lace, for drunken- 
ness, for freedom of language, and for unparal- 
leled political dissension. There are adherents 
of each of the four French parties — Legitimists, 
Orleanists, Imperialists, and Republicans — in 
this little mountain-town; and they all hate, 
loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Ex- 
cept for business purposes, or to give each other 
the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid aside 
even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere moun- 
tain Poland. In the midst of this Babylon I 



1 2 Velay, 

found myself a rallying-point ; every one was 
anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. 
This was not merely from the natural hospitality 
of mountain people, nor even from the surprise 
with which I was regarded as a man living of 
his own free will in Mo7iastier, when he might 
just as well have lived anywhere else in this big 
world ; it arose a good deal from my projected 
excursion southward through the Cevennes. A 
traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto un- 
heard of in that district. I was looked upon 
with contempt, like a man who should project a 
journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful 
interest, like one setting forth for the inclement 
Pole. All were ready to help in my prepara- 
tions ; a crowd of sympathizers supported me at 
the critical moment of a bargain ; not a step was 
taken but was heralded by glasses round and 
celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast. 

It was already hard upon October before I 
was ready to set forth, and at the high altitudes 



Donkey^ Pack^ and Pack-Saddle, 13 

over which my road lay there was no Indian 
summer to be looked for. I was determined, 
if not to camp out, at least to have the means 
of camping out in my possession ; for there is 
nothing more harassing to an easy mind than 
the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and 
the hospitality of a village inn is not always to 
be reckoned sure by those who trudge on foot. 
A tent, above all for a solitary traveller, is 
troublesome to pitch, and troublesome to strike 
again ; and even on the march it forms a con- 
spicuous feature in your baggage. A sleeping- 
sack, on the other hand, is always ready — you 
have only to get into it ; it serves a double pur- 
pose — a bed by night, a portmanteau by day ; 
and it does not advertise your intention of camp- 
ing out to every curious passer-by. This is a 
huge point. If the camp is not secret, it is but 
a troubled resting-place ; you become a public 
character ; the convivial rustic visits your bed- 
side after an early supper; and you must sleep 



14 Velay, 

with one eye open, and be up before the day. 
I decided on a sleeping-sack ; and after repeated 
visits to Le Pziy, and a deal of high living for 
myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was 
designed, constructed, and triumphally brought 
home. 

This child of my invention viras nearly six 
feet square, exclusive of tv^^o triangular flaps to 
serve as a pillow by night and as the top and 
bottom of the sack by day. I call it * the sack,' 
but it was never a sack by more than courtesy : 
only a sort of long roll or sausage, green water- 
proof cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur 
within. It was commodious as a valise, warm 
and dry for a bed. There was luxurious turning 
room for one ; and at a pinch the thing might 
serve for two. I could bury myself in it up to 
the neck ; for my head I trusted to a fur cap, 
with a hood to fold down over my ears and a 
band to pass under my nose like a respirator ; 
and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make 



Donkey, Pack, and Pack-Saddle, 1 5 

myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my water- 
proof coat, three stones, and a bent branch. 

It will readily be conceived that I could not 
carry this huge package on my own, merely 
human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast 
of burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among 
animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of 
tender health ; he is too valuable and too res- 
tive to be left alone, so that you are chained to 
your brute as to a fellow galley-slave ; a dan- 
gerous road puts him out of his wits ; in short, 
he's an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds 
thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What 
I required was something cheap and small and 
hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper ; and 
all these requisites pointed to a donkey. 

There dwelt an old man in Moitastier, of 
rather unsound intellect according to some, 
much followed by street-boys, and known to 
fame as Father Adam. Father Adam had a 
cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive she-ass, 



1 6 Velay, 

not much bigger than a dog, the color ot a 
mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined 
under-jaw. There was something neat and high- 
bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that 
hit my fancy on the spot. Our first interview 
was in Monastier market-place. To prove her 
good temper, one child after another was set 
upon her back to ride, and one after another 
went head over heels into the air ; until a want 
of confidence began to reign in youthful bosoms, 
and the experiment was discontinued from a 
dearth of subjects. I was already backed by a 
deputation of my friends ; but as if this were not 
enough, all the buyers and sellers came round 
and helped me in the bargain ; and the ass and 
I and Father Adam were the centre of a hubbub 
for near half an hour. At length she passed 
into my service for the consideration of sixty-five 
francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had 
already cost eighty francs and two glasses of 
beer ; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized 



Donkey, Pack, and Pack-Saddle, 1 7 

her, was upon all accounts the cheaper article. 
Indeed, that was as it should be ; for she was 
only an appurtenance of my mattress, or self- 
acting bedstead on four castors. 

I had a last interview with Father Adam in 
a billiard-room at the witching hour of dawn, 
when I administered the brandy. He professed 
himself greatly touched by the separation, and 
declared he had often bought white bread for the 
donkey when he had been content with black 
bread for himself ; but this, according to the 
best authorities, must have been a flight of fancy. 
He had a name in the village for brutally mis- 
using the ass ; yet it is certain that he shed a 
tear, and the tear made a clean mark down one 
cheek. 

By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, 
a leather pad was made for me with rings to 
fasten on my bundle ; and I thoughtfully com- 
pleted my kit and arranged my toilette. By 
way of armory and utensils, I took a revolver, 



1 8 Velay. 

a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some 
halfpenny candles, a jack-knife and a large 
leather flask. The main cargo consisted of two 
entire changes of warm clothing — besides my 
travelling wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, 
and knitted spencer — some books, and my rail- 
way-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, 
made me a double castle for cold nights. The 
permanent larder was represented by cakes of 
chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage. All this, 
except what I carried about my person, was 
easily stowed into the sheepskin bag ; and by 
good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, 
rather for convenience of carriage than from any 
thought that I should want it on my journey. 
For more immediate needs, I took a leg of cold 
mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais, an empty bottle 
to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a considerable 
quantity of black bread and white, like Father 
Adam, for myself and donkey, only in my scheme 
of things the destinations were reversed. 



Donkey, Pack, and Pack-Saddle, 19 

Monastrians, of all shades of thought in poli- 
tics, had agreed in threatening me with many 
ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death 
in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, rob- 
bers, above all the nocturnal practical joker, 
were daily and eloquently forced on my atten- 
tion. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent 
danger was left out. Like ChristiaUy it was 
from my pack I suffered by the way. Before 
telling my own mishaps, let me, in two words, 
relate the lesson of my experience. If the pack 
is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full 
length — not doubled, for your life — across the 
pack-saddle, the traveller is safe. The saddle 
will certainly not fit, such is the imperfection of 
our transitory life ; it will assuredly topple and 
tend to overset ; but there are stones on every 
roadside, and a man soon learns the art of cor- 
recting any tendency to overbalance with a well- 
adjusted stone. 

On the day of my departure I was up a little 



20 Velay. 

after five ; by six, we began to load the donkey ; 
and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the 
dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine s 
back for half a moment. I returned it to its 
maker, with whom I had so contumelious a pas- 
sage that the street outside was crowded from 
wall to wall with gossips looking on and listen- 
ing. The pad changed hands with much vivaci- 
ty ; perhaps it would be more descriptive to say 
that we threw it at each other's heads ; and, at 
any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and 
spoke with a deal of freedom. 
O I had a common donkey pack-saddle — a bardey 
as they call it — fitted upon Modestine; and once 
more loaded her with my effects. The doubled 
sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was 
to walk in my waistcoat), a great bar of black 
bread, and an open basket containing the white 
bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all 
corded together in a very elaborate system of 
knots, and I looked on the result with fatuous 



Donkey, Pack, and Pack-Saddle. 2 1 

content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all 
poised above the donkey's shoulders, with noth- 
ing below to balance, on a brand-new pack-saddle 
that had not yet been worn to fit the animal, 
and fastened with brand-new girths that might 
be expected to stretch and slacken by the way, 
even a very careless traveller should have seen 
disaster brewing. That elaborate system of 
knots, again, was the work of too many sympa- 
thizers to be very artfully designed. It is true 
they tightened the cords with a will ; as many as 
three at a time would have a foot against Modes- 
tine s quarters, and be hauling with clenched 
teeth ; but I learned afterwards that one*thought- 
ful person, without any exercise of force, can 
make a more solid job than half a dozen heated 
and enthusiastic grooms. I was then but a 
novice ; even after the misadventure of the pad 
nothing could disturb my security, and I went 
forth from the stable-door as an ox goeth to the 
slaughter. 



THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER. 



The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as 
I got quit of these preliminary troubles and 
descended the hill through the common. As 
long as I was within sight of the windows, 
a secret shame and the fear of some laughable 
defeat withheld me from tampering with Modes- 
tine. She tripped along upon her four small 
hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait ; from time 
to time she shook her ears or her tail ; and she 
looked so small under the bundle that my mind 
misgave me. We got across the ford without 
difficulty — there was no doubt about the matter, 
she was docility itself — and once on the other 
bank, where the road begins to mount through 
pine-woods, I took in my right hand the un- 



The Green Donkey-Driver, 23 

hallowed staff, and with a quaking spirit applied 
It to the donkey. Modestine brisked up her pace 
for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into 
her former minuet. Another application had 
the same effect, and so with the third. I am 
worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes 
against my conscience to lay my hand rudely 
on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over 
from head to foot ; the poor brute's knees were 
trembling and her breathing was distressed ; it 
was plain that she could go no faster on a hill. 
God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalize 
this innocent creature ; let her go at her own 
pace, and let me patiently follow. 

What, that pace was, there is no word mean 
enough to describe ; it was something as much 
slower than a walk as a walk is slower than 
a run ; it kept me hanging on each foot for an 
incredible length of time ; in five minutes it 
exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the 
muscles of the leg. And yet I had to keep 



24 Velay, 

close at hand and measure my advance exactly 
upon hers ; for if I dropped a few yards into the 
rear, or went on a few yards ahead, Modestine 
came instantly to a halt and began to browse. 
The thought that this was to last from here to 
Alais nearly broke my heart. Of all conceivable 
journeys, this promised to be the most tedious. 
I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day ; I tried 
to charm my foreboding spirit with tobacco ; 
but I had a vision ever present to me of the 
long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a 
pair of figures ever infinitesimally moving, foot 
by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like things 
enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no 
nearer to the goal. 

In the mean time there came up behind us a 
tall peasant, perhaps forty years of age, of an 
ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the 
green tail-coat of the country. He overtook 
us hand over hand, and stopped to consider our 
pitiful advance. 



The Green Donkey -Driver. 25 

* Your donkey/ says he, * is very old ? ' 
I told him, I believed not. 

Then, he supposed, we had come far. 

I told him, we had but newly left Mojtastier. 

* Et votes marcJiez comme qa ! ' cried he ; and, 
throwing back his head, he laughed long and 
heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel 
offended, until he had satisfied his mirth ; and 
then, ' You must have no pity on these animals,' 
said he ; and, plucking a switch out of a thicket, 
he began to lace Modestine about the stern- 
works, uttering a cry. The rogue pricked up 
her ears and broke into a good round pace, 
which she kept up without flagging, and without 
exhibiting the least symptom of distress, as long 
as the peasant kept beside us. Her former 
panting and shaking had been, I regret to say, 
a piece of comedy. 

My dens ex 7nacJiiua, before he left me, sup- 
plied some excellent, if inhumane, advice; pre- 
sented me with the switch, which he declared 



26 Velay. 

she would feel more tenderly than my cane ; 
and finally taught me the true cry or masonic 
word of donkey-drivers, ' Proot ! ' All the time, 
he regarded me with a comical incredulous air, 
which was embarrassing to confront ; and smiled 
over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled 
over his orthography, or his green tail-coat. 
But it was not my turn for the moment. 

I was proud of my new lore, and thought I 
had learned the art to perfection. And certainly 
Modestine did wonders for the rest of the fore- 
noon, and I had a breathing space to look about 
me. It was Sabbath ; the mountain-fields were 
all vacant in the sunshine ; and as we came 
down through St. Martin de Frugkres, the 
church was crowded to the door, there were 
people kneeling without upon the steps, and the 
sound of the priest's chanting came forth out 
of the dim interior. It gave me a home feeling 
on the spot ; for I am a countryman of the 
Sabbath, so to speak, and all Sabbath obser- 



The Green Donkey -Driver, 27 

varices, like a Scotch accent, strike in me mixed 
feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a 
traveller, hurrying by like a person from another 
planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and 
beauty of the great ascetic feast. The sight of 
the resting country does his spirit good. There 
is something better than music in the wide 
unusual silence ; and it disposes him to amiable 
thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the 
warmth of sunlight. 

In this pleasant humor I came down the hill 
to where Goiidet stands in a green end of a 
valley, with Chdteatt, Beaufort opposite upon a 
rocky steep, and the stream, as clear as crystal, 
lying in a deep pool between them. Above and 
below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, 
an amiable stripling of a river, which it seems 
absurd to call the Loire. On all sides, Gotidet 
is shut in by mountains ; rocky footpaths, prac- 
ticable at best for donkeys, join it to the outer 
world of France; and the men and women 



2 8 Velay, 

drink and swear, in their green corner, or look 
up at the snow-clad peaks in winter from the 
threshold of their homes, in an isolation, you 
would think, like that of Homer s Cyclops. But 
it is not so ; the postman reaches Goiidet with 
the letter-bag ; the aspiring youth of Goudet 
are within a day's walk of the railway at Le 
Piiy ; and here in the inn you may find an 
engraved portrait of the host's nephew, Regis 
Senac, * Professor of Fencing and Champion of 
the two Amerieas', a distinction gained by him, 
along with the sum of five hundred dollars, at 
Tammany Hall, New York, on the loth Aprils 
1876. 

I hurried over my midday meal, and was 
early forth again. But, alas, as we climbed the 
interminable hill upon the other side, *Proot!* 
seemed to have lost its virtue. I prooted hke 
a lion, I prooted mellifluously like a sucking- 
dove ; but Modestuie would be neither softened 
nor intimidated. She held doggedly to her 



The Green Donkey-Driver, 29 

pace ; nothing but a blow would move her, and 
that only for a second. I must follow at her 
heels, incessantly belaboring. A moment's 
pause in this ignoble toil, and she relapsed into 
her own private gait. I think I never heard of 
any one in as mean a situation. I must reach 
the lake of Botcchet, where I meant to camp, 
before sundown, and, to have even a hope of 
this, I must instantly maltreat this uncomplain- 
ing animal. The sound of my own blows 
sickened me. Once, when I looked at her, 
she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my 
acquaintance who formerly loaded me with 
kindness ; and this increased my horror of my 
cruelty. 

To make matters worse, we encountered 
another donkey, ranging at will upon the road- 
side ; and this other donkey chanced to be a 
gentleman. He and Modestine met nickering 
for joy, and I had to separate the pair and beat 
down their young romance with a renewed and 



30 Velay, 

feverish bastinado. If the other donkey had 
had the heart of a male under his hide, he 
would have fallen upon me tooth and hoof ; 
and this was a kind of consolation — he was 
plainly unworthy of Modestine s affection. But 
the incident saddened me, as did everything 
that spoke of my donkey's sex. 

It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, 
with vehement sun upon my shoulders ; and I 
had to labor so consistently with my stick 
that the sweat ran into my eyes. Every five 
minutes, too, the pack, the basket, and the 
pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side 
or the other; and I had to stop Modestine, just 
when I had got her to a tolerable pace of about 
two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and 
readjust the load. And at last, in the village of 
Ussel, saddle and all, the whole hypothec turned 
round and grovelled in the dust below the don- 
key's belly. She, none better pleased, incon- 
tinently drew up and seemed to smile ; and a 



The Green Donkey- Driver, 3 1 

party of one man, two women, and two children 
came up, and, standing round me in a half-circle, 
encouraged her by their example. 

I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing 
righted ; and the instant I had done so, with- 
out hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon 
the other side. Judge if I was hot ! And yet 
not a hand was offered to assist me. The man, 
indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a 
different shape. I suggested, if he knew nothing 
better to the point in my predicament, he might 
hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog 
agreed with me smilingly. It was the most 
despicable fix. I must plainly content myself 
with the pack for Modestiiie, and take the fol- 
lowing items for my own share of the portage : 
a cane, a quart flask, a pilot-jacket heavily 
weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black 
bread, and an open basket full of meats and 
bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid 
of greatness of soul ; for I did not recoil from 



32 Velay. 

this infamous burden. I disposed it, Heaven 
knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and 
then proceeded to steer Modcstiiie through the 
village. She tried, as was indeed her invariable 
habit, to enter every house and every courtyard 
in the whole length ; and, encumbered as I was, 
without a hand to help myself, no words can 
render an idea of my difficulties. A priest, with 
six or seven others, was examining a church 
in process of repair, and he and his acolytes 
laughed loudly as they saw my plight. I re- 
membered having laughed myself when I had 
seen good men struggling with adversity in the 
person of a jackass, and the recollection filled 
me with penitence. That was in my old light 
days, before this trouble came upon me. God 
knows at least that I shall never laugh again, 
thought I. But O, what a cruel thing is a farce 
to those engaged in it ! 

A little out of the village, Modestine^ filled 
with the demon, set her heart upon a by-road, 



The Green Donkey-Driver, 33 

and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all 
my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck 
the poor sinner twice across the face. It was 
pitiful to see her lift up her head with shut 
eyes, as if waiting for another blow. I came 
very near crying ; but I did a wiser thing than 
that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to 
consider my situation under the cheerful mflu- 
ence of tobacco and a nip of brandy. Modestine, 
in the mean while, munched some black bread 
with a contrite hypocritical air. It was plain 
that I must make a sacrifice to the gods of 
shipwreck. I threw away the empty bottle 
destined to carry milk ; I threw away my own 
white bread, and, disdaining to act by general 
average, kept the black bread for Modestine ; 
lastly, I threw away the cold leg of mutton and 
the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to 
my heart. Thus I found room for everything 
in the basket, and even stowed the boating-coat 
on the top. By means of an end of cord I 
3 



34 Velay, 

slung it under one arm ; and although the cord 
cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung almost 
to the ground, it was with a heart greatly light- 
ened that I set forth again. 

I had now an arm free to thrash ModestinCy 
and cruelly I chastised her. If I were to reach 
the lakeside before dark, she must bestir her 
little shanks to some tune. Already the sun 
had gone down into a windy-looking mist ; and 
although there were still a few streaks of gold 
far off to the east on the hills and the black fir- 
woods, all was cold and gray about our onward 
path. An infinity of little country by-roads led 
hither and thither among the fields. It was the 
most pointless labyrinth. I could see my desti- 
nation overhead, or rather the peak that domi- 
nates it; but choose as I pleased, the roads 
always ended by turning away from it, and 
sneaking back towards the valley, or northward 
along the margin of the hills. The failing light, 
the waning color, the naked, unhomely, stony 



The Green Donkey-Driver. ^j 

country through which I was travelling, threw 
me into some despondency. I promise yon, the 
stick was not idle ; I think every decent step 
that Modestine took must have cost me at least 
two emphatic blows. There was not another 
sound in the neighborhood but that of my un- 
wearying bastinado. 

Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load 
once more bit the dust, and, as by enchantment, 
all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and 
the road scattered with my dear possessions. 
The packing was to begin again from the begin- 
ning ; and as I had to invent a new and better 
system, I do not doubt but I lost half an hour. 
It began to be dusk in earnest as I reached a 
wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of 
being a road which should lead everywhere at 
the same time ; and I was falling into something 
not unlike despair when I saw two figures stalk- 
ing towv.rds me over the stones. They walked 
one behind the otli^r like tramps, but their 



36 Velay, 

pace was remarkable. The son led the way, a 
tall, ill-made, sombre, Scotch-looking man ; the 
mother followed, all in her Sunday's best, with 
an elegantly- embroidered ribbon to her cap, and 
a new felt hat atop, and proffering, as she strode 
along with kilted petticoats, a string of obscene 
and blasphemous oaths. 

I hailed the son and asked him my direction. 
He pointed loosely west and north-west, mut- 
tered an inaudible comment, and, without slack- 
ing his pace for an instant, stalked on, as he was 
going, right athwart my path. The mother fol- 
lowed without so much as raising her head. I 
shouted and shouted after them, but they con- 
tinued to scale the hillside, and turned a deaf 
ear to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine 
by herself, I was constrained to run after them, 
hailing the while. They stopped as I drew near, 
the mother still cursing ; and I could see she 
was a handsome, motherly, respectable-looking 
woman. The son once more answered me 



The Green Donkey-Driver, 37 

roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out 
again. But this time I simply collared the 
mother, who was nearest me, and, apologizing 
for my violence, declared that I could not let 
them go until they had put me on my road. 
They were neither of them offended — rather 
mollified than otherwise ; told me I had only to 
follow them ; and then the mother asked me 
what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I 
replied, in the Scotch manner, by inquiring if 
she had far to go herself. She told me, with 
another oath, that she had an hour and a half's 
road before her. And then, without salutation, 
the pair strode forward again up the hillside in 
the gathering dusk. 

I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly 
forward, and, after a sharp ascent of twenty 
minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The 
view, looking back on my day's journey, was 
both wild and sad. Mount Mezeiic and the 
peaks beyond St. yulien stood out in trenchant 



38 Velay, 

gloom against a cold glitter in the east ; and 
the intervening field of hills had fallen together 
into one broad wash of shadow, except here and 
there the outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, 
here and there a white irregular patch to repre- 
sent a cultivated farm, and here and there a blot 
where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laiisonne 
wandered in a gorge. 

Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise 
seized on my mind as I beheld a village of some 
magnitude close at hand ; for I had been told 
that the neighborhood of the lake was unin- 
habited except by trout. The road smoked in 
the twilight with children driving home cattle 
from the fields ; and a pair of mounted stride- 
legged women, hat and cap and all, dashed past 
me at a hammering trot from the canton where 
they had been to church and market. I asked 
one of the children where I was. At Bouchet 
St. NicolaSy he told me. Thither, about a mile 
south of my destination, and on the other side 



The Green Donkey-Driver. 39 

of a respectable summit, had these confused 
roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. 
My shoulder was cut, so that it hurt sharply ; 
my arm ached like toothache from perpetual 
beating ; I gave up the lake and my design to 
camp, and asked for the auberge. 



I HAVE A GOAD. 



The atihei'ge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among 
the least pretentious I have ever visited ; but I 
saw many more of the hke upon my journey. 
Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. 
Imagine a cottage of two stories, with a bench 
before the door ; the stable and kitchen in a 
stcite, so that Modestine and I could hear each 
other dining ; furniture of the plainest, earthen 
floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and 
that without any convenience but beds. In the 
kitchen cooking and eating go forward side by 
side, and the family sleep at night. Any one 
who has a fancy to wash must do so in public 
at the common table. The food is sometimes 
spare; hard fish and omelette have been my 



/ have a Goad. 41 

portion more than once ; the wine is of the 
smallest, the brandy abominable to man ; and 
the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table 
and rubbing against your legs, is no impossible 
accompaniment to dinner. 

But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of 
ten, show themselves friendly and considerate. 
As soon as you cross the doors you cease to 
be a stranger ; and although this peasantry 
are rude and forbidding on the highway, they 
show a tincture of kind breeding when you 
share their hearth. At Boiichet, for instance, I 
uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais, and asked the 
host to join me. He would take but little. 

* I am an amateur of such wine, do you see } ' 
he said, 'and I am capable of leaving you not 
enough.* 

In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected 
to eat with his own knife ; unless he ask, no 
other will be supplied : with a glass, a whang of 
bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely 



42 Velay, 

laid. My knife was cordially admired by the 
landlord of Boiichet, and the spring filled him 
with wonder. 

* I should never have guessed that/ he said. 
•I would bet,' he added, weighing it in his hand, 
* that this cost you not less than five francs.' 

When I told him it had cost me twenty, his 
jaw dropped. 

He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly 
old man, astonishingly ignorant. His wife, who 
was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how 
to read, although I do not suppose she ever did 
so. She had a share of brains and spoke with a 
cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast. 

' My man knows nothing/ she said, with an 
angry nod ; ' he is like the beasts.' 

And the old gentleman signified acquiescence 
with his head. There was no contempt on her 
part, and no shame on his ; the facts were 
accepted loyally, and no more about the matter. 

I was tightly cross-examined about my jour- 



/ have a Goad, 43 

ney ; and the lady understood in a motnent, and 
sketched out what I should put into my book 
when I got home. ' Whether people harvest or 
not in such or such a place ; if there were for- 
ests ; studies of manners ; what, for example, T 
and the master of the house say to you ; the 
beauties of Nature, and all that.' And she 
interrogated me with a look. 
'It is just that,' said I. 

* You see,' she added to her husband, ' I un- 
derstood that.' 

They were both much interested by the story 
of my misadventures. 

* In the morning,' said the husband, ' I will 
make you something better than your cane. 
Such a beast as that feels nothing ; it is in the 
proverb — dur comme tm due ; you might beat 
her insensible with a cudgel, and yet you would 
arrive nowhere.' 

Something better ! I httle knew what h^ 
was offering. 



44 Velay, 

The sleeping-room was furnished with two 
beds. 1 had one ; and I will own I was a little 
abashed to find a young man and his wife and 
child in the act of mounting into the other. This 
was my first experience of the sort ; and if I am 
always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I 
pray God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes 
to myself, and know nothing of the woman 
except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed 
no whit abashed by my appearance. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the situation was more trying to me 
than to the pair. A pair keep each other in 
countenance ; it is the single gentleman who has 
to blush. But I could not help attributing my 
sentiments to the husband, and sought to con- 
ciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from 
my flask. He told me that he was a cooper 
of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of 
work, and that in his spare moments he followed 
k the fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he' 
readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant. 



/ have a Goad. 45 

I was up first in the morning {Monday^ Sep- 
tember 22)d), and hastened my toilet guiltily, so 
as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's 
wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to 
explore the neighborhood of Bouchet. It was 
perishing cold, a gray, windy, wintry morning ; 
misty clouds flew fast and low ; the wind piped 
over the naked platform ; and the only speck of 
color was away behind Mount Me'zenc and the 
eastern hills, where the sky still wore the orange 
of the dawn. 

It was five in the morning, and four thousand 
feet above the sea ; and I had to bury my 
hands in my pockets and trot. People were 
trooping Out to the labors of the field by twos 
and threes, and all turned round to stare upon 
the stranger. I had seen them coming back 
last night, I saw them going afield again ; and 
there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell. 

When I came back to the inn for a bit of 
breakfast, the landlady was in the kitchen 



46 Velay. 

combing out her daughter's hair ; and I made 
her my compliments upon its beauty. 

* O no/ said the mother ; ' it is not so beauti- 
ful as it ought to be. Look, it is too fine.' 

Thus does a wise peasantry console itself 
under adverse physical circumstances, and, by a 
startling democratic process, the defects of the 
majority decide the type of beauty. 

* And where,' said I, * is monsieur .-* ' 

'The master of the house is up-stairs,* she 
answered, ' making you a goad.' 

Blessed be the man who invented goads ! 
Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet St, Nicolas^ 
who introduced me to their use! This plain 
wand, with an eighth of an inch of pin, was in- 
deed a sceptre when he put it in my hands. 
Thenceforward Modestme was my slave. A 
prick, and she passed the most inviting stable- 
door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant 
little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not 
a remarkable speed, when all was said ; and we 



, / have a Goad, 47 

took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of 
it. But what a heavenly change since yester- 
day ! No more wielding of the ugly cudgel ; no 
more flailing with an aching arm ; no more 
broadsword exercise, but a discreet and gentle- 
manly fence. And what although now and then 
a drop of blood should appear on Modestine s 
mouse-colored wedge-like rump t I should have 
preferred it otherwise, indeed ; but yesterday's 
exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. 
The perverse little devil, since she would not 
be taken with kindness, must even go with 
pricking. 

It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a 
cavalcade of stride-legged ladies and a pair of 
post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the 
way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident 
but one. A handsome foal with a bell about his 
neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of 
common, sniffed the air martially as one about 
to do great deeds, and, suddenly thinking other- 



48 Velay, 

wise in his green young heart, put about and 
galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling 
in the wind. For a long while afterwards I saw 
his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the 
note of his bell ; and when I struck the high- 
road, the song of the telegraph-wires seemed to 
continue the same music. 

Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the 
A liter, surrounded by rich meadows. They were 
cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the 
neighborhood, this gusty autumn morning, an 
untimely smell of hay. On the opposite bank 
of the A I Her the land kept mounting for miles 
to the horizon : a tanned and sallow autumn 
landscape, with black blots of fir-wood and white 
roads wandering through the hills. .Over all 
this the clouds shed a uniform and purplish 
shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exagger- 
ating height and distance, and throwing into 
still higher relief the twisted ribbons of the 
highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one 



/ have a Goad, 49 

stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon 
the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld lay in 
another county — wild Gevaiidaji, mountainous, 
uncultivated, and but recently disforested from 
terror of the wolves. 

Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the 
traveller's advance; and you may trudge through 
all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with 
an adventure worth the name. But here, if 
anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope. 
For this was the land of the ever-memorable 
Beast, the Napoleon Bttojiaparie of wolves. What 
a career was his ! . He lived ten months at free 
quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais ; he ate 
women and children and 'shepherdesses cele- 
brated for their beauty ; ' he pursued armed 
horsemen ; he has been seen at broad noonday 
chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the 
king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing 
before him at the gallop. He was placarded 
like a political offender, and ten thousand francs 

4 



50 Velay, 

were offered for his head. And yet, when he 
was shot and sent to Versailles, behold ! a com- 
mon wolf, and even small for that. ' Though I 
could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander 
Pope; the little corporal shook Europe ; and if 
all wolves had been as this wolf, they would have 
changed the history of man. M. Elie Berthet 
has made him the hero of a novel, which I have 
read, and do not wish to read again. 

I hurried over my lunch, and was proof 
against the landlady's desire that I should 
visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed 
many miracles, although she was of wood ; ' and 
before three quarters of an hour I was goading 
Modes tine down the steep descent that leads to 
Langogne on the Allier. On both sides of the 
road, in big dusty fields, farmers were preparing 
for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of 
great-necked stolid oxen were patiently haling 
at the plough. I saw one of these mild, formi- 
dable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden 



/ have a Goaa. 51 

interest in Modestine and me. The furrow down 
which he was journeying lay at an angle to the 
road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke 
like those of caryatides below a ponderous cor- 
nice ; but he screwed round his big honest eyes 
and followed us with a ruminating look, until his 
master bade him turn the plough and proceed 
to reascend the field. From all these furrowing 
ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a 
laborer here and there who was breaking the 
dry clods with a hoe, the wind carried away a 
thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, 
busy, breathing, rustic landscape ; and as I con- 
tinued to descend, the highlands of Gevaudan 
kept mounting in front of me against the sky. 
I had crossed the Loire the day before ; now 
I was to cross the Allier ; so near are these two 
confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of 
Langogney as the long-promised rain was begin- 
ning to fall, a lassie of some seven or eight ad- 
dressed me in the sacramental phrase, ^ Doust 



52 Velay. 

que vous venezV She did it with so high an 
air that she set me laughing; and this cut her to 
the quick. She was evidently one who reckoned 
on respect, and stood looking after me in silent 
dudgeon, as I crossed the bridge and entered 
the county of G^vaudan, 



UPPER GEVAUDAN. 



* The way also here was very weart- 
some through dirt ajtd slabbi- 
ness; nor was there on all this 
ground so much as one inn or 
victualling-house wherein to r<f- 
fresh the feebler sort: — Pil- 
grim's Progress. 



UPPER GEVAUDAN. 



A CAMP IN THE DARK. 

The next day {Tuesday, September 24/^), it was 
two o'clock in the afternoon before I got my 
journal written up and my knapsack repaired, 
for I was determined to carry my knapsack in 
the future and have no more ado with baskets ; 
and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le 
Cheylard V Eve que, a place on the borders of the 
forest of Mercoire. A man, I was told, should 
walk there in an hour and a half ; and I thought 
it scarce too ambitious to suppose that a man 
encumbered with a donkey might cover the same 
distance in four hours. 

All the way up the long hill from Langogne 
it rained and hailed alternately ; the wind kept 
freshening steadily, although slowly ; plentiful 



56 upper G'evaudan, 

hurrying clouds — some dragging veils of straight 
rain-shower, others massed and luminous, as 
though promising snow — careered out of the 
north and followed me along my way. I was 
soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier^ 
and away from the ploughing oxen, and such- 
like sights of the country. Moor, heathery 
marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch 
all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and 
there a few naked cottages and bleak fields, — 
these were the characters of the country. Hill 
and valley followed valley and hill ; the little 
green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in and 
out of one another, split into three or four, died 
away in marshy hollows, and began again 
sporadically on hillsides or at the borders of 
a wood. . 

There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it 
was no easy affair to make a passage in this 
uneven country and through this intermittent 
labyrinth of tracks. It must have been about 



A Camp in the Dark, 57 

four when I struck Sagnerousse, and went on my 
w^ay rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two 
hours afterwards, the dusk rapidly falling, in a 
lull of the wind, I issued from a fir-wood where 
I had long been wandering, and found, not the 
looked-for village, but another marish bottom 
among rough-and-tumble hills. For some time 
past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells 
ahead ; and now, as I came out of the skirts of 
the wood, I saw near upon a dozen cows and 
perhaps as many more black figures, which 
I conjectured to be children, although the mist 
had almost unrecognizably exaggerated their 
forms. These were all silently following each 
other round and round in a circle, now taking 
hands, now breaking up with chains and rev- 
erences. A dance of children appeals to very 
innocent and lively thoughts ; but, at nightfall 
on the marshes, the thing was eerie and fan- 
tastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough 
read in Herbert Spencer^ felt a sort of silence fall 



58 upper Gevaudan. 

for an instant on my mind. The next, I was 
pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like 
an unruly ship through the open. In a path, 
she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as 
before a fair wind ; but once on the turf or 
among heather, and the brute became demented. 
The tendency of lost travellers to go round in 
a circle was developed in her to the degree of 
passion, and it took all the steering I had in me 
to keep even a decently straight course through 
a single field. 

While I was thus desperately tacking through 
the bog, children and cattle began to disperse, 
until only a pair of girls remained behind. 
From these I sought direction on my path. 
The peasantry in general were but Httle disposed 
to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply 
retired into his house, and barricaded the door 
on my approach ; and I might beat and shout 
myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, 
having given me a direction which, as I found 



A Camp in the Dark, 59 

afterwards, I had misunderstood, complacently 
watched me going wrong without adding a sign. 
He did not care a stalk of parsley if I wandered 
all night upon the hills ! As for these two girls, 
they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not 
a thought but mischief. One put out her tongue 
at me, the other bade me follow the cows ; 
and they both giggled and jogged each other's 
elbows. The Beast of Gevaudmt ate about a 
hundred children of this district ; I began to 
think of him with sympathy. 

Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the 
bog, and got into another wood and upon a 
well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. 
Modestine, suddenly beginning to smell mischief, 
bettered the pace of her own accord, and from 
that time forward gave me no trouble. It was 
the first sign of intelligence I had occasion to 
remark in her. At the same time, the wind 
freshened into half a gale, and another heavy 
discharge of rain came flying up out of the 



6o Upper Gevaudan, 

north. At the other side of the wood I sighted 
some red windows in the dusk. This was the 
hamlet of Fouzilhic ; three houses on a hillside, 
near a wood of birches. Here I found a deUght- 
ful old man, who came a little way with me in 
the rain to put me safely on the road for Chey- 
lard. He would hear of no reward ; but shook 
his hands above his head almost as if in menace, 
and refused volubly and shrilly, in unmitigated 
patois. 

All seemed right at last. My thoughts began 
to turn upon dinner and a fireside, and my heart 
was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and 
I was on the brink of new and greater miseries ! 
Suddenly, at a single swoop, the night fell. I 
have been abroad in many a black night, but never 
in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of 
the track where it was well beaten, a certain fleecy 
density, or night within night, for a tree, — this 
was all that I could discriminate. The sky was 
simply darkness overhead ; even the flying clouds 



A Camp m the Dark, 6i 

pursued their way invisibly to human eyesight. 
I could not distinguish my hand at arm's length 
from the track, nor my goad, at the same 
distance, from the meadows or the sky. 

Soon the road that I was following split, 
after the fashion of the country, into three or 
four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modes- 
tme had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I 
tried her instinct in this predicament. But the 
instinct of an ass is what might be expected 
from the name ; in half a minute she was 
clambering round and round among some 
boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to 
see. I should have camped long before had I 
been properly provided ; but as this was to be 
so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no 
bread for myself, and a little over a pound for my 
lady-friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine 
were both handsomely wetted by the showers. 
But now, if I could have found some water, I 
shonld have camped at once in spite of all. 



62 upper Gevaudan, 

Water, however, being entirely absent, except in 
the form of rain, I determined to return to 
Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little further on my 
way — * a little farther lend thy guiding hand.* 

The thing was easy to decide, hard to 
accomplish. In this sensible roaring blackness 
I was sure of nothing but the direction of the 
wind. To this I set my face ; the road had 
disappeared, and I went across country, now in 
marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable 
to Modes tine, until I came once more in sight of 
some red windows. This time they were differ- 
ently disposed. It was not Foiizilhic, but Fou- 
zilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in 
space, but worlds away in the spirit of its 
inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and 
groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plun- 
ging mid-leg in bog, until I gained the entrance 
of the village. In the first lighted house there 
was a woman who would not open to me. She 
could do nothing, she cried to me through the 



A Camp in the Dark, 63 

door, being alone and lame ; but if I would 
apply at the next house, there was a man who 
could help me if he had a mind. 

They came to the next door in force, a man, 
two women, and a girl, and brought a pair of 
lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man 
was not ill-looking, but had a shifty smile. He 
leaned against the doorpost, and heard me state 
my case. All I asked was a guide as far as 
Cheylard. 

* Cest que, voyez-vous, ilfait noir! said he. 

I told him that was just my reason for re- 
quiring help. 

*I understand that,' said he, looking uncom- 
fortable ; * mats — c'esi — de la peine^ 

I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his 
head. I rose as high as ten francs ; but he con- 
tinued to shake his head. ' Name your own 
price, then,' said I. 

' Ce nest pas qal he said at length, and 
with evident difficulty ; ' but I am not going 



64 upper Gevaudan, 

to cross the door — mais je ne sortirai pas de 
la porte! 

I grew a little warm, and asked him what he 
-proposed that I should do. 

* Where are you going beyond CheylardV he 
asked by way of, answer. 

* That is no affair of yours/ I returned, for 
I was not going to indulge his bestial curi- 
osity ; ' it changes nothing in my present pre- 
dicament.' 

' Cest vrai, ga,' he acknowledged, with a laugh ; 
* oui, cest vrai. Et d'oii venez-vous ? ' 

A better man than I might have felt nettled. 

' O,' said I, ' I am not going to answer any 
of your questions, so you may spare yourself 
the trouble of putting them. I am late enough 
already ; I want help. If you will not guide me 
yourself, at least help me to find some one else 
who will' 

* Hold on,' he cried suddenly. * Was it not 
you who passed in the meadow while it was 
still day .? ' 



A Camp in the Dark. 65 

* Yes, yes,' said the girl, whom I had not 
hitherto recognized ; ' it was monsieur ; I told 
him to follow the cow.' 

*As for you, mademoiselle,' said I, 'you are 
2.farceuse! 

'And,' added the man, 'what the devil have 
you done to be still here ? ' 

What the devil, indeed ! But there I was. 
'The great thing,' said I, 'is to make an end of 
it; ' and once more proposed that he should help 
me to find a guide. 

^ C est que', he said again, ^cest que — il fait 
noir.^ 

' Very well,' said I ; ' take one of your lan- 
terns.' 

' No,' he cried, drawing a thought backward, 
and again intrenching himself behind one of his 
former phrases ; ' I will not cross the door.' 

I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror 
struggling on his face with unaffected shame ; 
he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with 
5 



66 Upper Gevatidan, 

his tongue, like a detected school-boy. I drew a 
brief picture of my state, and asked him what I 
was to do. 

* I don't know,* he said ; ' I will not cross the 
door.' 

Here was the Beast of Gevaudan, and no 
mistake. 

' Sir,' said I, with my most commanding man- 
ners, * you are a coward.' 

And with that I turned my back upon the 
family party, who hastened to retire within their 
fortifications ; and the famous door was closed 
again, but not till I had overheard the sound of 
laughter. Filia barbara pater barbarior. Let 
me say it in the plural : the Beasts of Gevaudmt. 

The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and 
I ploughed distressfully among stones and rub- 
bish-heaps. All the other houses in the village 
were both dark and silent ; and though I knocked 
at here and there a door, my knocking was un- 
answered. It was a bad business ; I gave up 



A Camp tn the Dark. 67 

Fotizil/iac v^'ith. my curses. The rain had stopped, 
and the wind, which still kept rising, began to 
dry my coat and trousers. * Very well,' thought 
I, ' water or no water, I must camp.' But the 
first thing was to return to Modestme. I am 
pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for 
my lady in the dark ; and if it had not been for 
the unkindly services of the bog, into which 
I once more stumbled, I might have still been 
groping for her at the dawn. My next business 
was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind 
v/as cold as well as boisterous. How, in this 
well-wooded district, I should have been so 
long in finding one, is another of the insoluble 
mysteries of this day's adventures ; but I will 
take my oath that I put near an hour to the 
discovery. 

At last black trees began to show upon my 
left, and, suddenly crossing the road, made a 
cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I 
call it a cave without exaggeration ; to pass 



68 Upper Gevaudan, 

below that arch of leaves was like entering a 
dungeon. I felt about until my hand encoun- 
tered a stout branch, and to this I tied Modestme, 
a haggard, drenched, desponding donkey. Then 
I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the 
margin of the road, and unbuckled the straps. 
I knew well enough where the lantern was ; but 
where were the candles "i I groped and groped 
among the tumbled articles, and, while I was 
thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit- 
lamp. Salvation ! This would serve my turn 
as well. The wind roared unwearyingly among 
the trees ; I could hear the boughs tossing and 
the leaves churning through half a mile of forest ; 
yet the scene of my encampment was not only 
as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At 
the second match the wick caught flame. The 
light was both livid and shifting ; but it cut me 
off from the universe, and doubled the darkness 
of the surrounding night. 

I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, 



A Camp in the Dark. 69 

and broke up half the black bread for her supper, 
reserving the other half against the morning. 
Then I gathered what I should want within 
reach, took off my wet boots and gaiters, which 
I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knap- 
sack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping- 
bag, insinuated my limbs into the interior, and 
buckled myself in like a bambino. I opened a 
tin of Bologna sausage and broke a cake of 
chocolate, and that was all I had to eat. It 
may sound offensive, but I ate them together, 
bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I 
had to wash down this revolting mixture was 
neat brandy : a revolting beverage in itself. But 
I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked 
one of the best cigarettes in my experience. 
Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the 
flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put 
my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled 
well down among the sheepskins. 

I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt 



70 Upper Gevaudan, 

my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an 
agreeable excitement to which my mind remained 
a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, 
that subtle glue leaped between them, and they 
would no more come separate. The wind among 
the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded 
for minutes together with a steady even rush, 
not rising nor abating ; and again it would swell 
and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the 
trees would patter me all over with big drops 
from the rain of the afternoon. Night after 
night, in my own bedroom in the country, I 
have given ear to this perturbing concert of the 
wind among the woods ; but whether it was a 
difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, 
or because I was myself outside and in the midst 
of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a 
different tune among these woods of Gevaudan, 
I hearkened and hearkened ; and meanwhile 
sleep took gradual possession of my body and 
subdued my thoughts and senses ; but still 



A Camp in the Dark. 71 

my last waking effort was to listen and distin- 
guish, and my last conscious state was one of 
wonder at the foreign clamor in my ears. 

Twice in the course of the dark hours — once 
when a stone galled me underneath the sack, 
and again when the poor patient Modestiney 
growing angry, pawed and stamped upon the 
road — I was recalled for a brief while to con- 
sciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and 
the lace-like edge of the foliage against the sky. 
When I awoke for the third time {Wednesday^ 
September 25///), the world was flooded with a 
blue light, the mother of the dawn. I saw the 
leaves laboring in the wind and the ribbon of 
the road ; and, on turning my head, there was 
Modestine tied to a beech, and standing half 
across the path in an attitude of inimitable 
patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to 
thinking over the experience of the night. I 
was surprised to find how easy and pleasant it 
had been, even in this tempestuous weather. 



72 upper Gevaudan, 

The stone which annoyed me would not have 
been there, had I not been forced to camp blind- 
fold in the opaque night; and I had felt no 
other inconvenience, except when my feet en- 
countered the lantern or the second volume of 
Peyrafs Pastors of the Desei't among the mixed 
contents of my sleeping-bag ; nay more, I had 
felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with 
unusually lightsome and clear sensations. 

With that, I shook myself, got once more into 
my boots and gaiters, and, breaking up the rest 
of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see 
in what part of the world I had awakened. 
Ulysses, left on Ithacay and with a mind unsettled 
by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. 
I have been after an adventure all my life, 
a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell 
early and heroic voyagers ; and thus to be found 
by morning in a random woodside nook in Ge- 
vatidan — not knowing north from south, as 
strange to my surroundings as the first man 



A Camp in the Dark, 73 

upon the earth, an inland castaway — was to 
find a fraction of my day-dreams realized. I 
was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, 
sprinkled with a few beeches ; behind, it ad- 
joined another wood of fir ; and in front, it 
broke up and went down in open order into a 
shallow and meadowy dale. All around there 
were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as 
the perspective closed or opened, but none ap- 
parently much higher than the rest. The wind 
huddled the trees. The golden specks of au- 
tumn in the birches tossed shiveringly. Over- 
head the sky was full of strings and shreds of 
vapor, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turn- 
ing about an axis like tumblers, as the wind 
hounded them through heaven. It was wild 
weather and famishing cold. I ate some choco- 
late, swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked 
a cigarette before the cold should have time to 
disable my fingers. And by the time I had got 
all this done, and had made my pack and bound 



74 Upper Gevaudan. 

it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the 
threshold of the east. We had not gone many 
steps along the lane, before the sun, still invisible 
to me, sent a glow of gold Over some cloud moun- 
tains that lay ranged along the eastern sky. 

The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us 
bitingly forward. I buttoned myself into my 
coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind 
with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there 
was FotizilJiic once more in front of me. Nor 
only that, but there was the old gentleman who 
had escorted me so far the night before, running 
out of his house at sight of me, with hands 
upraised in horror. 

* My poor boy ! ' he cried, ' what does this 
mean } ' 

I told him what had happened. He beat his 
old hands like clappers in a mill, to think how 
lightly he had let me go ; but when he heard 
of the man of FouzilJiac^ anger and depression 
seized upon his mind. 



A Camp in the Dark, 75 

'This time, at least,' said he, 'there shall be 
no mistake.' 

And he limped along, for he was very rheu- 
matic, for about half a mile, and until I was 
almost within sight of CJieylardy the destination 
I had hunted for so lone:. 



CHEYLARD AND LUC. 



Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this 
searching. A few broken ends of village, with 
no particular street, but a succession of open 
places heaped with logs and fagots ; a couple 
of tilted crosses, a shrine to our Lady of all 
Graces on the summit of a little hill ; and all 
this, upon a rattling highland river, in the corner 
of a naked valley. What went ye out for to see ? 
thought I to myself. But the place had a life 
of its own. I found a board commemorating 
the liberalities of Cheylard for the past year, 
hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and 
tottering church. In 1877, it appeared, the 
inhabitants subscribed forty-eight francs ten 
centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of 



Cheylard and Luc. 'j'j 

the Faith.' Some of this, I could not help 
hoping, would be applied to my native land. 
Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the 
darkened souls in Ediiibtcrgh ; while Balqiiidder 
and Diuu'ossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. 
Thus, to the high entertainment of the angels, 
do we pelt each other with evangelists, like 
school-boys bickering in the snow. 

The inn was again singularly unpretentious. 
The whole furniture of a not ill-to-do family was 
in the kitchen : the beds, the cradle, the clothes, 
the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photo- 
graph of the parish priest. There were five 
children, one of whom was set to its morning 
prayers at the stair-foot soon after my arrival, 
and a sixth would erelong be forthcoming. I was 
kindly received by these good folk. They were 
much interested in my misadventure. The wood 
in which I had slept belonged to them ; the man 
of Fonzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, 
and counselled me warmly to summon him at 



7 8 Upper Gevattdan, 

law — 'because I might have died.' The good 
wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a 
pint of uncreamed milk. 

' You will do yourself an evil,' she said. ' Per- 
mit me to boil it for you.' 

After I had begun the morning on this de- 
lightful liquor, she having an infinity of things 
to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to 
make a bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots 
and gaiters were hung up to dry, and, seeing me 
trying to write my journal on my knee, the 
eldest daughter let down a hinged table in the 
chimney-corner for my convenience. Here I 
wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an 
omelette before I left. The table was thick with 
dust ; for, as they explained, it was not used 
except in winter weather. I had a clear look up 
the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot 
and blue vapor, to the sky ; and whenever a 
handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my 
legs were scorched by the blaze. 



Cheylard and Luc, 79 

The husband had begun life as a muleteer, 
and when I came to charge Modestine showed 
himself full of the prudence of his art. * You 
will have to change this package,' said he ; * it 
ought to be in two parts, and then you might 
have double the weight.' 

I explained that I wanted no more weight ; 
and for no donkey hitherto created would I cut 
my sleeping-bag in two. 

' It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper ; 
it fatigues her greatly on the march. Look.' 

Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than 
raw beef on the inside, and blood was running 
from under her tail. They told me when I left, 
and I was ready to believe it, that before a few 
days I should come to love Modestine like a dog. 
Three days had passed, we had shared some mis- 
adventures, and my heart was still as cold as a 
potato towards my beast of burden. She was 
pretty enough to look at ; but then she had 
given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed 



8o Upper Gevaudan. 

by patience, but aggravated by flashes of sorry 
and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I own 
this new discovery seemed another point against 
her. What the devil was the good of a she-ass 
if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few 
necessaries ? I saw the end of the fable rapidly 
approaching, when I should have to carry Modes- 
tine. yEsop was the man to know the world ! 
I assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon 
my short day's march. 

It was not only heavy thoughts about Modes- 
tine that weighted me upon the way ; it was a 
leaden business altogether. For first, the wind 
blew so rudely that I had to hold on the pack 
with one hand from CJieylard to Luc ; and sec- 
ond, my road lay through one of the most beg- 
garly countries in the world. It was like the 
worst of the Scotch Highlands, only worse ; 
cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant 
of heather, scant of life. A road and some 
fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line 



Cheylard mid Luc. 8i 

of the road was marked by upright pillars, to 
serve in time of snow. 

• Why any one should desire to visit either 
Liic or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing 
spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not 
to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's 
sake. The great affair is to move ; to feel the 
needs and hitches of our life more nearly ; to 
come down off this feather-bed of civilization, 
and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn 
with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, 
and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a 
holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To 
hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale 
out of the freezing north is no high industry, 
but it is one that serves to occupy and compose 
the mind. And when the present is so exacting, 
who can annoy himself about the future } 

I came out at length above the Allier. A 
more unsightly prospect at this season of the 
year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills 
6 



82 upper Gevaudan. 

rose round it on all sides, here dabbled with 
wood and fields, there rising to peaks alternately 
naked and hairy with pines. The color through* 
out was black or ashen, and came to a point in 
the ruins of the castle of Ltic, which pricked up 
impudently from below my feet, carrying on a 
pinnacle a tall white statue of our Lady, which, 
I heard with interest, weighed fifty quintals, 
and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October, 
Through this sorry landscape trickled the Allier 
and a tributary of nearly equal size, which came 
down to join it through a broad nude valley in 
Vivarais. The weather had somewhat light- 
ened, and the clouds massed in squadron ; but 
the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, 
and cast great ungainly splashes of shadow and 
sunlight over the scene. 

LzLC itself was a straggling double file of 
houses wedged between hill and river. It had 
no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, 
save the old castle overhead with its fifty quin- 



Cheylard and Luc, 83 

tab of brand-new Madonna. But the inn was 
clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box- 
beds hung with clean check curtains, with its 
wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards 
long and garnished with lanterns and religious 
statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking 
clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen 
ought to be ; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for 
bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the 
scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, 
silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in 
black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had 
a character of its own, with the long deal tables 
and benches, where fifty might have dined, set 
out as for a harvest-home, and the three box- 
beds along the wall. In one of these, lyin» on 
straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, 
did I do penance all night long in goose-flesh 
and chattering teeth, and sigh from time to time 
as I awakened for my sheepskin sack and the 
lee of some great wood. 



OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS. 



' / behold 
The House ^ the Brotherhood austere—' 
And what am /, that I am here ? ' 

Matthew Arnold. 



OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS. 



FATHER APOLLINARIS. 

Next morning {Thursday, 20th September) I took 
the. road in a new order. The sack was no 
longer doubled, but hung at full length across 
the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a 
tuft of blue wool hanging out of either end. It 
was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and, 
as I began to see, it would insure stability, blow 
high, blow low. But it was not without a pang 
that I had so decided. For although I had pur- 
chased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was 
able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps 
should tumble out and scatter my effects along 
the line of march. 

My way lay up the bald valley of the river, 
along the march of Vivarais and G^vaudan. The 



88 Our Lady of the Snows. 

hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more 
naked, i£ anything, than those of Vivarais upon 
the left, and the former had a monopoly of a 
low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the 
gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the 
shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir- 
wood were plastered here and there upon both 
sides, and here and there were cultivated fields. 
A railway ran beside the river ; the only bit of 
railway in Gevaztdan, although there are many 
proposals afoot and surveys being made, and 
even, as they tell me, a station standing ready- 
built in Mende. A year or two hence and this 
may be another world. The desert is beleaguered. 
Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn 
the sonnet into patois : ' Mountains and vales 
and floods, heard ye that whistle t ' 

At a place called La Bastide I was directed 
to leave the river, and follow a road that 
mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais^ 
the modern Ardkhe ; for I was now come within 



Father Apollinaris. 89 

a little way of my strange destination, the Trap- 
pi st monastery of our Lady of the Snows. The 
sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, 
and I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to 
the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire, 
closed the view, and between these lay ridge 
upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering 
on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in 
the hollows, as rude as God made them at the 
first. There was not a sign of man's hand in all 
the prospect ; and indeed not a trace of his 
passage, save where generation after generation 
had walked in twisted footpaths, in and out 
among the beeches, and up and down upon 
the channelled slopes. The mists, which had 
hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, 
and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. 
I drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, 
after so long, upon a scene of some attraction 
for the human heart. I own I like definite form 
in what my eyes are to rest upon ; and if land- 



90 Our Lady of the Snows, 

scapes w^re sold, like the sheets of characters of 
my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence 
colored, I should go the length of twopence 
every day of my life. 

But if things had grown better to the south, 
it was still desolate and inclement near at hand. 
A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the 
neighborhood of a religious house ; and a quarter 
of a mile beyond, the outlook southward open- 
ing out and growing bolder with every step, 
a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a 
young plantation directed the traveller to our 
Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck left- 
ward, and pursued my way, driving my secular 
donkey before me, and creaking in my secular 
boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence. 

I had not gone very far ere the wind brought 
to me the clanging of a bell, and somehow, I 
can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at 
the sound. I have rarely approached anything 
with more unaffected terror than the monastery 



Father Apollinaris. 91 

of our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have 
had a Protestant education. And suddenly, on 
turning a corner, fear took hold on me from 
head to foot — slavish superstitious fear ; and 
though I did not stop in my advance, yet I 
went on slowly, like a man who should have 
passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into 
the country of the dead. For there upon the 
narrow new-made road, between the stripling 
pines, was a mediaeval friar, fighting with a 
barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my child- 
hood I used to study the Hermits of Marco 
Sadeler — enchanting prints, full of wood and 
field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a 
county, for the imagination to go a travelling 
in ; and here, sure enough, was one of Marco 
Sadeler s heroes. He was robed in white like 
any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the 
instancy of his contention with the barrow, 
disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull. 
He might have been buried any time these 



92 Our Lady of the Snows. 

thousand years, and all the lively parts of him 
resolved into earth and broken up with the 
farmer's harrow. 

I was troubled besides in my mind as to 
etiquette. Durst I address a person who was 
under a vow of silence ? Clearly not. But 
drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a far- 
away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, 
and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to 
the monastery } Who was I .? An Englishman ? 
Ah, an Irishman, then } 

* No,' I said, ' a Scotsman.' 

A Scotsman } Ah, he had never seen a 
Scotsman before. And he looked me all over, 
his good, honest, brawny countenance shining 
with interest, as a boy might look upon a lion 
or an alligator. From him I learned with dis- 
gust that I could not be received at our Lady of 
the Snoivs ; I might get a meal, perhaps, but 
that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and 
it turned out that I was not a pedler, but a 



Father Apollinaris, 93 

literary man, who drew landscapes and was 
going to write a book, he changed his manner 
of thinking as to my reception (for I fear they 
respect persons even in a Trappist monastery), 
and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father 
Prior, and state my case to him in full. On 
second thoughts he determined to go down with 
me himself ; he thought he could manage for me 
better. Might he say that I was a geographer ? 

No ; I thought, in the interests of truth, he 
positively might not. 

*Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an 
author.' 

It appeared he had been in a seminary with 
six young Irishmen, all priests long since, who 
had received newspapers and kept him informed 
of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. 
And he asked me eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for 
whose conversion the good man had continued 
ever since to pray night and morning. 

'I thought he was very near the truth/ he 



94 Our Lady of the Snows, 

said ; ' and he will reach it yet ; there is so much 
virtue in prayer.' 

He must be a stiff ungodly Protestant who 
can take anything but pleasure in this kind and 
hopeful story. While he was thus near the sub- 
ject, the good father asked me if I were a Chris- 
tian ; and when he found I was not, or not after 
his way, he glossed it over with great good-will. 

The road which we were following, and 
which this stalwart father had made with his 
own two hands within the space of a year, came 
to a corner, and showed us some white buildings 
a little further on beyond the wood. At the 
same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. 
We were hard upon the monastery. Father 
Apollifiaris (for that was my companion's name) 
stopped me. 

' I must not speak to you down there,' he 
said. * Ask for the Brother Porter, and all will 
be well. But try to see me as you go out 
again through the wood, where I may speak to 



Father Apollinaris. 95 

you. I am charmed to have made your acquaint- 
ance.' 

And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping 
his fingers, and crying out twice, ' I must not 
speak, I must not speak ! ' he ran away in front 
of me, and disappeared into the monastery-door. 

I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity 
went a good way to revive my terrors. But 
where one was so good and simple, why should 
not all be alike } I took heart of grace, and 
went forward to the gate as fast as Modesthie, 
who seemed to have a disaffection for monas- 
teries, would permit. It was the first door, in 
my acquaintance of her, which she had not 
shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned 
the place in form, though with a quaking heart. 
Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and a 
pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate 
and spoke with me awhile. I think my sack 
was the great attraction ; it had already beguiled 
the heart of poor Apollijiaris, who had charged 



96 Our Lady of the Snows, 

me on my life to show it to the Father Prior. 
But whether it was my address, or the sack, or 
the idea speedily published among that part of 
the brotherhood who attend on strangers that I 
was not a pedler after all, I found no difficulty 
as to my reception. Modestine was led away by 
a layman to the stables, and I and my pack 
were received into our Lady of the Snows, 



THE MONKS. 



Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smil- 
ing man, perhaps of thirty-five, took me to 
the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to 
stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or 
rather I should say he listened to my prattle 
indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, 
like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly 
when I remember that I descanted principally 
on my appetite, and that it must have been 
by that time more than eighteen hours since 
Father Michael had so much as broken bread, 
I can well understand that he would find an 
earthly savor in my conversation. But his 
mannei, though superior, was exquisitely gra- 
7 



98 Our Lady of the Snows, 

cious ; and I find I have a lurking curiosity as 
to Father MicJiaeVs past. 

The whet administered, I was left alone 
for a little in the monastery garden. This is 
no more than the main court, laid out in sandy 
paths and beds of party-colored dahlias, and 
with a fountain and a black statue of the Virgin 
in the centre. The buildings stand around it 
four-square, bleak, as yet unseasoned by the 
years and weather, and with no other features 
than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. 
Brothers in white, brothers in brown, passed 
silently along the sanded alleys ; and when I 
first came out, three hooded monks were kneel- 
ing on the terrace at their prayers. A naked 
hill commands the monastery upon one side, 
and the wood commands it on the other. It 
lies exposed to wind ; the snow falls off and on 
from October to May, and sometimes lies six. 
weeks on end ; but if they stood in Ederi, with 
a climate like heaven's, the buildings themselves 



The Monks, 99 

would offer the same wintry and cheerless 
aspect ; and for my part, on this wild September 
day, before I was called to dinner, I felt chilly 
in and out. 

When I had eaten well and heartily. Brother 
Ambrose, a hearty conversable Frenchman (for 
all those who wait on strangers have the liberty 
to speak), led me to a little room in that part 
of the building which is set apart for MM, les 
retraitants. It was clean and whitewashed, 
and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, 
a bust of the late Pope, the Imitation in French, 
a book of religious meditations, and the life of 
Elizabeth Seton, evangelist, it would appear, 
of North Avierica and of New England in par- 
ticular. As far as my experience goes, there 
is a fair field for some more evangelization in 
these quarters ; but think of Cotton Mather I 
I should like to give him a reading of this 
little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells ; 
but perhaps he knows all that already, and 



lOO Our Lady of the Sfzows, 

much more ; and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton 
are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their 
voices in the everlasting psalm. Over the table, 
to conclude the inventory of the room, hung a 
set of regulations for MM. les retraitants : what 
services they should attend, when they were to 
tell their beads or meditate, and when they were 
to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable 
N. B. : * Le temps libre est employ d d Vexamen de 
conscience, a la confession, a faire de bonnes rho- 
lutions' &c. To make good resolutions, indeed ! 
You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair 
grow on your head. 

I had scarce explored my niche when Brother 
Ambrose returned. An English boarder, it ap- 
peared, would like to speak with me. I professed 
my willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, 
young little Irishman of fifty, a deacon of the 
Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wear- 
ing on his head what, in default of knowledge, 
I can only call the ecclesiastical shako. He 



The Monks, loi 

had lived seven years in retreat at a convent of 
nuns in Belgitini, and now five at our Lady of 
the Snows ; he never saw an English news- 
l^aper ; he spoke French imperfectly, and had 
he spoken it like a native, there was not much 
chance of conversation where he dwelt. With 
this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of 
news, and simple-minded like a child. If I was 
pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he 
was no less delighted to see an English face and 
hear an English tongue. 

He showed me his own room, where he passed 
his time among breviaries, Hebrew bibles, and 
the Waverley novels. Thence he led me to 
the cloisters, into the chapter-house, through 
the vestry, where the brothers' gowns and broad 
straw hats were hanging up, each with his 
religious name upon a board, — names full 
of legendary suavity and interest, such as 
Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique ; into the 
library, where were all the works of Veicillot 



I02 Our Lady of the Snows. 

and Chatccmbriand, and the Odes et Ballades^ 
if you please, and even Molih'c, to say nothing of 
innumerable fathers and a great variety of local 
and general historians. Thence my good Irish- 
man took me round the workshops, where broth- 
ers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take 
photographs ; where one superintends a collec- 
tion of curiosities, and another a gallery of rab- 
bits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk 
has an occupation of his own choice, apart from 
his religious duties and the general labors of 
the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he 
has a voice and ear, and join in the haymaking 
if he has a hand to stir ; but in his private 
hours, although he must be occupied, he may be 
occupied on what he likes. Thus I was told 
that one brother was engaged with literature ; 
while Father Apolliiiaris busies himself in mak- 
ing roads, and the Abbot employs himself in 
binding books. It is not so long since this 
Abbot was consecrated, by the way ; and on 



The Monks. 103 

that occasion, by a special grace, his mother 
was permitted to enter the chapel and witness 
the ceremony of consecration. A proud day 
for her to have a son a mitred abbot ; it makes 
you glad to think they let her in. 

In all these journeyings to and fro, many 
silent fathers and brethren fell in our way. 
Usually they paid no more regard to our passage 
than if we had been a cloud ; but sometimes the 
good deacon had a permission to ask of them, 
and it was granted by a peculiar movement of 
the hands, almost like that of a dog's paws in 
swimming, or refused by the usual negative 
signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids 
and a certain air of contrition, as of a man who 
was steering very close to evil. 

The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, 
were still taking two meals a day ; but it was 
already time for their grand fast, which begins 
somewhere in September and lasts till Easter^ 
and during which they eat but once in the 



I04 Our Lady of the Snows, 

twenty-four hours, and that at two in the after- 
noon, twelve hours after they have begun the 
toil and vigil of the day. Their meals are scanty, 
but even of these they eat sparingly ; and 
though each is allowed a small carafe of wine, 
many refrain from this indulgence. Without 
doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat 
themselves ; our meals serve not only for sup- 
port, but as a hearty and natural diversion from 
the labor of life. Although excess may be hurt- 
ful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen 
defective. And I am astonished, as I look back, 
at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of 
manner of all whom I beheld. A happier nor a 
healthier company I should scarce suppose that 
I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this 
bleak upland, and with the incessant occupation 
of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and 
death no infrequent visitor, at our Lady of the 
Snows. This, at least, was what was told me. 
But if they die easily, they must live healthily 



The Mo7iks. 105 

in the mean time, for they seemed all firm of 
flesh and high in color ; and the only mor- 
bid sign that I could observe, an unusual brill- 
iancy of eye, was one that served rather to 
increase the general impression of vivacity and 
strength. 

Those with whom I spoke were singularly 
sweet-tempered, with what I can only call a holy 
cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is 
a note, in the direction to visitors, telling them 
not to be offended at the curt speech of those 
who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks 
to speak little. The note might have been 
spared ; to a man the hospitallers were all brim- 
ming with innocent talk, and, in my experience 
of the monastery, it was easier to begin than to 
break off a conversation. With the exception 
of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, 
they showed themselves full of kind and healthy 
interest in all sorts of subjects — in politics, in 
voyages, in my sleeping-sack — and not without 



io6 Our Lady of the Snows, 

3. certain pleasure in the sound of their own 
voices. 

As for those who are restricted to silence, I 
can only wonder how they bear their solemn 
and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from 
any view of mortification, I can see a certain 
policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but 
in this vow of silence. I have had some experi- 
ence of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to 
say a bacchanalian, character ; and seen more 
than one association easily formed and yet more 
easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, per- 
haps they might have lasted longer. In the 
neighborhood of women it is but a touch-and-go 
association that can be formed among defence- 
less men ; the stronger electricity is sure to 
triumph ; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes 
of youth, are abandoned after an interview 
of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, 
and professional male jollity, deserted at once 
for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent. 



The Monks, 107 

And next after this, the tongue is the great 
divider. 

I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly 
criticism of a religious rule ; but there is yet an- 
other point in which the Trappist order appeals 
to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the 
morning the clapper goes upon the bell, and so 
on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by 
quarter, till eight, the hour of rest ; so infinitesi- 
mally is the day divided among different occupa- 
tions. The man who keeps rabbits, for example, 
hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the 
chapter-room, or the refectory, all day long : 
every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to 
perform ; from two, when he rises in the dark, 
till eight, when he returns to receive the com- 
fortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and 
occupied with manifold and changing business. 
I know many persons, worth several thousands 
in the year, who are not so fortunate in the dis- 
posal of their lives. Into how many houses 



io8 Our Lady of the Snozvs. 

would not the note of the monastery-bell, 
dividing the day into manageable portions, 
bring peace of mind and healthful activity 
of body? We speak of hardships, but the 
true hardship is to be a dull fool, and per- 
mitted to mismanage life in our own dull and 
foolish manner. 

From this point of view, we may perhaps 
better understand the monk's existence. A 
long novitiate, and every proof of constancy of 
mind and strength of body is required before 
admission to the order; but I could not find that 
many were discouraged. In the photographer's 
studio, which figures so strangely among the 
outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the por- 
trait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private 
of foot. This was one of the novices, who came 
of the age for service, and marched and drilled 
and mounted guard for the proper time among 
the garrison of Algiers. Here was a man who 
had surely seen both sides of life before decid- 



The Monks. 109 

ing ; yet as soon as he was set free from service 
he returned to finish his novitiate. 

This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as 
by right. When the Trappist sickens, he quits 
not his habit ; he lies in the bed of death as he 
has prayed and labored in his frugal and silent 
existence ; and when the Liberator comes, at the 
very moment, even before they have carried him 
in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel 
among continual chantings, joy-bells break forth, 
as if for a marriage, from the slated belfry, and 
proclaim throughout the neighborhood that an- 
other soul has gone to God. 

At night, under the conduct of my kind Irish- 
man, I took my place in the gallery to hear 
compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cis- 
tercians bring every day to a conclusion. There 
were none of those circumstances which strike 
the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the 
public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, 
heightened by the romance of the surroundings, 



T lo Our Lady of the Snows. 

spoke directly to the heart. I recall the white- 
washed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, 
the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the 
strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, 
the sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and 
then the clear trenchant beating of the bell, 
breaking in to show that the last office was over 
and the hour of sleep had come ; and when I 
remember, I am not surprised that I made my 
escape into the court with somewhat whirling 
fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in the 
windy starry night. 

But I was weary ; and when I had quieted 
my spirits with Elizabeth Setons memoirs — a 
dull work — the cold and the raving of the wind 
among the pines — for my room was on that side 
of the monastery which adjoins the woods — 
disposed me readily to slumber. I was wakened 
at black midnight, as it seemed, though it was 
really two in the morning, by the first stroke 
upon the bell. All the brothers were then hur- 



The Monks, in 

rying to the chapel ; the dead in life, at this 
untimely hour, were already beginning the un- 
comfoited labors of their day. The dead in life 
— there was a chill reflection. And the words 
of a French song came back into my memory, 
telling of the best of our mixed existence : — 

'Que t'as de belles filles, 

Girofle ! 

Girofla ! 

Que t'as de belles filles, 

L * Amour les comptera 1 * 

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, 
free to hope, and free to love. 



THE BOARDERS. 



But there was another side to my residence at 
our Lady of the Snows. At this late season 
there were not many boarders ; and yet I was 
not alone in the public part of the monastery. 
This itself is hard by the gate, with a small 
dining-room on the ground-floor, and a whole 
corridor of cells similar to mine up-stairs. I have 
stupidly forgotten the board for a regular re- 
traitant ; but it was somewhere between three 
and five francs a day, and I think most probably 
the first. Chance visitors like myself might 
give what they chose as a free-will offering, but 
nothing was demanded. I may mention that 
when I was going away, Father Michael refused 
twenty francs as excessive. I explained the rea- 



The Boarders. 113 

soning which led me to offer him so much ; but 
even then, from a curious point of honor, he 
would not accept it with his own hand. * I have 
no right to refuse for the monastery,' he ex- 
plained, ' but I should prefer if you would give 
it to one of the brothers.' 

I had dined alone, because I arrived late ; but 
at supper I found two other guests. One was a 
country parish priest, who had walked over that 
morning from the seat of his cure near Mende 
to enjoy four days of solitude and prayer. He 
was a grefiadier in person, with the hale color 
and circular wrinkles of a peasant ; and as he 
complained much of how he had been impeded 
by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid 
fancy portrait of him, striding along, upright, 
big-boned, with kilted cassock, through the bleak 
hills of Givaudan. The other was a short, 
grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, 
dressed in tweed with a knitted spencer, and the 
red ribbon of a decoration in his buttonhole 



1 14 Ottr Lady of the Snows, 

This last was a hard person to classify. He 
was an old soldier, who had seen service and 
risen to the rank of commandant ; and he re- 
tained some of the brisk decisive manners of 
the camp. On the other hand, as soon as his 
resignation was accepted, he had come to our 
Lady of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a 
brief experience of its ways, had decided to 
remain as a novice. Already the new life was 
beginning to modify his appearance ; already he 
had acquired somewhat of the quiet and smiling 
air of the brethren ; and he was as yet neither 
an officer nor a Trappist, but partook of the 
character of each. And certainly here was a man 
in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise 
of cannon and trumpets, he was in the act of pass- 
ing into this still country bordering on the grave, 
where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, 
and, like phantoms, communicate by signs. 

At supper we talked politics. I make it my 
business, when I am in France^ to preach political 



The Boarders, 115 

good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the 
example of Poland^ much as some alarmists in 
England dwell on the example of Carthage. 
The priest and the Commandant assured me of 
their sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy 
sighing over the bitterness of contemporary 
feeling. 

*Why, you cannot say anything to a man 
with which he does not absolutely agree,' said I, 
* but he flies up at you in a temper.' 

They both declared that such a state of things 
was antichristian. 

While we were thus agreeing, what should 
my tongue stumble upon but a word in praise of 
Gambettds moderation. The old soldier's coun- 
tenance was instantly suffused with blood ; with 
the palms of his hands he beat the table like a 
naughty child. 

* Comment, monsieur f ' he shouted. ' Com- 
ment f Gambetta moderate } Will you dare to 
justify these words?* 



ii6 Our Lady of the Snows, 

But the priest bad not forgotten the tenor of 
our talk. And suddenly, in the height of his 
fury, the old soldier found a warning look di- 
rected on his face ; the absurdity of his behavior 
was brought home to him in a flash ; and the 
storm came to an abrupt end, without another 
word. 

It was only in the morning, over our coffee 
{Friday^ September 2'jth), that this couple found 
out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled 
them by some admiring expressions as to the 
monastic life around us ; and it was only by a 
point-blank question that the truth came out. 
I had been tolerantly used, both by simple Father 
Apollinaris and astute Father Michael ; and the 
good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious 
weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder 
and said, * You must be a Catholic and come to 
heaven.' But I was now among a different sect 
of orthodox. These two men were bitter and 
upright and narrow, like the worst of Scotsmen, 



The Boarders, 117 

and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were 
worse. The priest snorted aloud like a battle- 
horse. 

^ Et votis pr^tendez mourir dans cette espke 
de croymice ? ' he demanded ; and there is no 
type used by mortal printers large enough to 
qualify his accent. 

I humbly indicated that I had no design of 
changing. 

But he could not away with such a monstrous 
attitude. ' No, no,' he cried ; * you must change. 
You have come here, God has led you here, and 
you must embrace the opportunity.' 

I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the 
family affections, though I was speaking to a 
priest and a soldier, two classes of men circum- 
stantially divorced from the kind and homely 
ties of life. 

*Your father and mother.?' cried the priest. 
* Very well ; you will convert them in their turn 
when you go home.' 



1 1 8 Our Lady of the Snows, 

I think I see my father's face ! I would 
rather tackle the Gaetulian lion in his den than 
embark on such an enterprise against the family 
theologian. 

But now the hunt was up ; priest and soldier 
were in full cry for my conversion ; and the 
Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which 
the people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight 
francs ten centimes during 1877, was being gal- 
lantly pursued against myself. It was an odd 
but most effective proselytizing. They never 
sought to convince me in argument, where I 
might have attempted some defence ; but took 
it for granted that I was both ashamed and ter- 
rified at my position, and urged me solely on the 
point of time. Now, they said, when God had 
led me to our Lady of the SnoivSy now was the 
appointed hour. 

* Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed 
the priest, for my encouragement. 

For one who feels very similarly to all sects 



The Boarders. 1 1 9 

of religion, and who has never been able, even 
for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of 
this or that creed on the eternal side of things, 
however much he may see to praise or blame 
upon the secular and temporal side, the situation 
thus created was both unfair and painful. I 
com^nitted my second fault in tact, and tried to 
plead that it was all the same thing in the end, 
and we were all drawing near by different sides 
to the same kind and undiscriminating Friend 
and Father. That, as it seems to lay-spirits, 
would be the only gospel worthy of the name. 
But different men think differently ; and this 
revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest 
with all the terrors of the law. He launched 
into harrowing details of hell. The damned, he 
said — on the authority of a little book which he 
had read not a week before, and which, to add 
conviction to conviction, he had fully intended 
to bring along with him in his pocket — were to 
occupy the same attitude through all eternity 



1 20 Our Lady of the Snows. 

in the midst of dismal tortures. And as he 
thus expatiated, he grew in nobihty of aspect 
with his enthusiasm. 

As a result the pair concluded that I should 
seek out the Prior, since the Abbot was from 
home, and lay my case immediately before him. 

' C^est inon conseil co7nme ancien militaire* 
observed the Commandant ; ' et cehd de mon- 
sieur comme pretre! 

'■ OuV, added the curcy sententiously nodding ; 
* comme ancien militaire — et comme pretre' 

At this moment, whilst I was somewhat em- 
barrassed how to answer, in came one of the 
monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, 
and with an Italian accent, who threw himself at 
once into the contention, but in a milder and 
more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these 
pleasant brethren. Look at him, he said. The 
rule was very hard ; he would have dearly liked 
to stay in his own country, Italy — it was well 
known how beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy ; 



The Boarders. 121 

but then there were no Trappists in Italy ; and 
he had a soul to save ; and here he was. 

I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a 
cheerful Indian critic has dubbed me, ' a fad- 
dling h edon ist ; ' for this description of the broth- 
er's motives gave me somewhat of a shock. I 
should have preferred to think he had chosen 
the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior 
purposes ; and this shows how profoundly I was 
out of sympathy with these good Trappists, 
even when I was doing my best to sympathize. 
But to the cure the argument seemed decisive. 

' Hear that ! ' he cried. ' And I have seen a 
marquis here, a marquis, a marquis ' — he repeated 
the holy word three times over — * and other per- 
sons high in society ; and generals. And here, 
at your side, is this gentleman, who has been so 
many years in armies — decorated, an old warr 
rior. And here he is, ready to dedicate himself 
to God.' 
.1 was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed 



122 Oicr Lady of the Snows, 

that I pleaded cold feet, and made my escape 
from the apartment. It was a furious windy 
morning, with a sky much cleared, and long and 
potent intervals of sunshine ; and I wandered 
until dinner in the wild country towards the east, 
sorely staggered and beaten upon by the gale, 
but rewarded with some striking views. 

At dinner the Work of the Propagation of 
the Faith was recommenced, and on this occasion 
still more distastefully to me. The priest asked 
me many questions as to the contemptible faith 
of my fathers, and received my replies with a 
kind of ecclesiastical titter. 

'Your sect,' he said once ; 'for I think you 
will admit it would be doing it too much honor 
to call it a religion.' 

' As you please, monsieur,' said I. ^ La parole 
est a V Otis' 

At length I grew annoyed beyond endur- 
ance ; and although he was on his own ground, 
and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, 



The Boarders. 123 

and so holding a claim upon my toleration, I 
could not avoid a protest against this uncivil 
usage. He was sadly discountenanced. 

* I assure you/ he said, ' I have no inclination 
to laugh in my heart. I have no other feeling 
but interest in your soul.' 

And there ended my conversion. Honest 
man ! he was no dangerous deceiver ; but a 
country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long 
may he tread Gevmtdan with his kilted skirts — 
a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his 
parishioners in death ! I dare say he would beat 
bravely through a snow-storm where his duty 
called him ; and it is not always the most faith- 
ful believer who makes the cunningest apostle. 



UPPER GEVAUDAN 

{continued^. 



' The bed was made^ the room wasfit^ 
By piinchtal eve the stars were lit ; 
The air was sweety the water ran ; . 
No need was there for maid or ijzan, 
When we put up^ my ass and I^ 
At God^s green caravajiserai.^ 

Old Play. 



UPPER GEVAUDAN 

(continued). 



ACROSS THE GOULET. 

The wind fell during dinner, and the sky re- 
mained clear ; so it was under better auspices 
that I loaded Mo destine before the monastery- 
gate. My Irish friend accompanied me so far 
on the way. As we came through the wood, 
there was P^re Apollinaire hauling his barrow ; 
and he too quitted his labors to go with me for 
perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand be- 
tween both of his in front of him. I parted first 
from one and then from the other with unfeigned 
regret, but yet with the glee of the traveller who 
shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying 
forth upon another. Then Modestine and I 
mounted the course of the Allier, which here led 



128 upper Gevaudan (continued^ 

us back into Gevaudan towards its sources in 
the forest of Mercoire. It was but an inconsider- 
able burn before we left its guidance. Thence, 
over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau, 
until we reached Chasserades at sundown. 

The company in the inn-kitchen that night 
were all men employed in survey for one of the 
projected railways. They were intelligent and 
conversable, and we decided the future of France 
over hot wine, until the state of the clock fright- 
ened us to rest. There were four beds in the 
little up-stairs room ; and we slept six. But I 
had a bed to myself, and persuaded t.-om to 
leave the window open. 

' He, bourgeois ; il est cinq heures ! ' was the 
cry that wakened me in the morning {Saturday, 
September 2^th). The room was full of a j/ns- 
parent darkness, which dimly showed ' =_ the 
other three beds and the five different n r T^aps 
on the pillows. But out of the window e dawn 
was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill- 



Across the Goulet. 129 

tops, and day was about to flood the plateau. 
The hour was inspiriting ; and there seemed a 
promise of calm weather, which was perfectly 
fulfilled. I was soon under way with Modestine. 
The road lay for a while over the plateau, and 
then descended through a precipitous village 
into the valley of the Chassezac. This stream 
ran among green meadows, well hidden from 
the world by its steep banks ; the broom was in 
flower, and here t^nd there was a hamlet sending 
up its smoke. 

At ]' ^t the path crossed the Chassezac upon 
a bridg'4 and, forsaking this deep hollow, set 
itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It 
wound up through Lestampes by upland fields 
and woods of beech and birch, and with every 
corn brought me into an acquaintance with 
some • -w interest. Even in the gully of the 
Oias^ . ' my ear had been struck by a noise 
like tha of a great bass bell ringing at the 
distance o^ many miles ; but this, as I continued 
9 



130 * upper Gevaudan {continued), 

to mount and draw nearer to it, seemed to 
change in character, and I found at length that 
it came from some one leading flocks afield to 
the note of a rural horn. The narrow street of 
Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall 
— black sheep and white, bleating like the birds 
in spring, and each one accompanying himself 
upon the sheep-bell round his neck. It made a 
pathetic concert, all in treble. A little higher, 
and I passed a pair of men in a tree with prun- 
ing-hooks, and one of them was singing the 
music of a boiirree. Still further, and when I 
was already threading the birches, the crowing 
of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and 
along with that the voice of a flute discoursing 
a deliberate and plaintive air from one of the 
upland villages. I pictured to myself some 
grizzled, apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster 
fluting in his bit of a garden in the clear autumn 
sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting 
sounds filled my heart with an unwonted expec- 



Across the Goulet. 131 

tation ; and it appeared to me that, once past 
this range which I was mounting, I should 
descend into the garden of the world. Nor was 
I deceived, for I was now done with rains and 
winds and a bleak country. The first part of 
my journey ended here ; and this was like an 
induction of sweet sounds into the other and 
more beautiful. 

There are other degrees of /^/ness, as of 
punishment, besides the capital ; and I was now 
led by my good spirits into an adventure which 
I relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. 
The road zigzagged so widely on the hillside 
that I chose a short cut by map and compass, 
and struck through the dwarf woods to catch the 
road again upon a higher level. It was my one 
serious conflict with Modestine. She would none 
of my short cut ; she turned in my face, she 
backed, she reared ; she, whom I had hitherto 
imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a 
loud hoarse flourish, like a cock crowing for the 



132 upper Gevaudan {continued). 

dawn. I plied the goad with one hand ; with 
the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold 
on the pack-saddle. Half a dozen times she was 
nearly over backwards on the top of me ; half a 
dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I 
was nearly giving it up, and leading her down 
again to follow the road. But I took the thing 
as a wager, and fought it through. I was sur- 
prised, as I went on my way again, by what 
appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my 
hand, and more than once looked up in wonder 
at the cloudless sky. But it was only sweat 
which came dropping from my brow. 

Over the summit of the Gotdet there was no 
marked road — only upright stones posted from 
space to space to guide the drovers. The turf 
underfoot was springy and well scented. I had 
no company but a lark or two, and met but one 
bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. 
In front of me I saw a shallow valley, and 
beyond that the range of the Lozhe, sparsely 



Across the Goulet, 133 

wooded and well enough modelled in the flanks, 
but straight and dull in outline. There was 
scarce a sign of culture ; only about Bleymard, 
the white high-road from Villefoj't to Mende 
traversed a range of meadows, set with spiry 
poplars, and sounding from side to side with 
the bells of flocks and herds. 



A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES. 



From Bleymard after dinner, although it was 
already late, I set out to scale a portion of the 
Lozhe. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided 
me forward ; and I met nearly half a dozen 
bullock-carts descending from the woods, each 
laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's 
firing. At the top of the woods, which do not 
climb very high upon this cold ridge, I struck 
leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit 
on a dell of green turf, where a streamlet made 
a little spout over some stones to serve me for 
a water-tap. ' In a more sacred or sequestered 
bower — nor nymph nor faunus haunted.' The 
trees were not old, but they grew thickly round 
the glade : there was no outlook, except north- 



A Night among the Pines. 135 

eastward upon distant hill-tops, or straight up- 
ward to the sky ; and the encampment felt 
secure and private like a room. By the time 
1 had made my arrangements and fed Modestine, 
the day was already beginning to decline. I 
buckled myself to the knees into my sack and 
made a hearty meal ; and as soon as the sun 
went down, I pulled my cap over my eyes and 
fell asleep. 

Night is a dead monotonous period under a 
roof ; but in the open world it passes lightly, 
with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the 
hours are marked by changes in the face of 
Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death 
to people choked between walls and curtains, is 
only a light and living slumber to the man who 
sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature 
breathing deeply and freely ; even as she takes 
her rest she turns and smiles ; and there is one 
stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in 
houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad 



136 upper Gevaudan (continued), 

over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the out- 
door world are on their feet. It is then that the 
cock first crows, not this time to announce the 
dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding 
the course of night. Cattle awake on the mead- 
ows ; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, 
and change to a new lair among the ferns ; and 
houseless men, who have lain down with the 
fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty 
of the night. 

At what inaudible summons, at what gentle 
touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus re- 
called in the same hour to life .-* Do the stars 
rain down an influence, or do we share some 
thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies .? 
Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are 
the deepest read in these arcana, have not a 
guess as to the means or purpose of this nightly 
resurrection. Towards two in the morning they 
declare the thing takes place ; and neither know 
nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant 



A Night among the Pines, 137 

incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only, 
like the luxurious Montaigjie, ' that we may the 
better and more sensibly relish it' We have a 
moment to look upon the stars, and there is a 
special pleasure for some minds in the reflection 
that we share the impulse with all out-door crea- 
tures in our neighborhood, that we have escaped 
out of the Bastille of civilization, and are become, 
for the time being, a mere kindly animal and a 
sheep of Nature's flock. 

When that hour came to me among the pines, 
I wakened thirsty. My tin was standing by me 
half full of water. I emptied it at a draught ; 
and feeling broad awake after this internal cold 
aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette. The 
stars were clear, colored, and jewel-like, but not 
frosty. A faint silvery vapor stood for the 
Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points 
stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness 
of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walk- 
ing round and round at the length of her tether ; 



1 38 upper Gevaudan {continued), 

I could hear her steadily munching at the sward ; 
but there was not another sound, save the in- 
describable quiet talk of the runnel over the 
stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the 
color of the sky, as we call the void of space, 
from where it showed a reddish gray behind 
the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black 
between the stars. As if to be more like a 
pedler, I wear a silver ring. This I could see 
faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigar- 
ette ; and at each whiff the inside of my hand 
was illuminated, and became for a second the 
highest light in the landscape. 

A faint wind, more like a moving coolness 
than a stream of air, passed down the glade 
from time to time ; so that even in my great 
chamber the air was being renewed all night 
long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chas- 
seradh and the congregated nightcaps ; with 
horror of the nocturnal prowesses of clerks and 
students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close 



A Night among the Pines, 139 

rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene 
possession of myself, nor felt more independent 
of material aids. The outer world, from which 
we cower into our houses, seemed after all a 
gentle habitable place ; and night after night a 
man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for 
him in the fields, where God keeps an open 
house. I thought I had rediscovered one of 
those truths which are revealed to savages and 
hid from political economists : at the least, I had 
discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet 
even while I was exulting in my solitude I be- 
came aware of a strange lack. I wished a com- 
panion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and 
not moving, but ever within touch. For there 
is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, 
and which, rightly understood, is solitude made 
perfect. And to live out of doors with the 
woman a man loves is of all lives the most 
complete and free. 

As I thus lay, between content and longing, 



140 upper Gevaudan (continued), 

a faint noise stole towards me through the 
pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing 
of cocks or the barking of dogs at some very 
distant farm ; but steadily and gradually it took 
articulate shape in my ears, until I became 
aware that a passenger was going by upon the 
high-road in the valley, and singing loudly as he 
went. There was more of good-will than grace 
in' his performance ; but he trolled with ample 
lungs ; and the sound of his voice took hold 
upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the 
leafy glens. I have heard people passing by 
night in sleeping cities ; some of them sang ; 
one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes. 
I have heard the rattle of a cart or carriage 
spring up suddenly after hours of stillness, and 
pass, for some minutes, within the range of my 
hearing as I lay abed. There is a romance 
about all who are abroad in the black hours, and 
with something of a thrill we try to guess their 
business. But here the romance was double: 



A Night among the Pines, 141 

first, this glad passenger, lit internally with 
wine, who sent up his voice in music through 
the night ; and then I, on the other hand, 
buckled into my sack, and smoking alone in 
the pine-woods between four and five thousand 
feet towards the stars. 

When I awoke again {Sunday, 2^th Sep- 
tember), many of the stars had disappeared ; 
only the stronger companions of the night still 
burned visibly overhead ; and away towards the 
east I saw a faint haze of light upon the 
horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when 
I was last awake. Day was at hand. I lit my 
lantern, and by its glowworm light put on my 
boots and gaiters ; then I broke up some bread 
for Modestine, filled my can at the water-tap, 
and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some 
chocolate. The blue darkness lay long in the 
glade where I had so sweetly slumbered ; but 
soon there was a broad streak of orange melting 
into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. 



142 upper Gevaudan (continued), 

A solemn glee possessed my mind at this 
gradual and lovely coming in of day. I heard 
the runnel with delight ; I looked round me for 
something beautiful and unexpected ; but the 
still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the 
munching ass, remained unchanged in figure. 
Nothing had altered but the light, and that, 
indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of 
breathing peace, and moved me to a strange 
exhilaration. 

I drank my water chocolate, which was hot 
if it was not rich, and strolled here and there, 
and up and down about the glade. While I 
was thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as 
long as a heavy sigh, poured direct out of the 
quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set 
me sneezing. The trees near at hand tossed 
their black plumes in its passage ; and I could 
see the thin distant spires of pine along the 
edge of the hill rock slightly to and fro against 
the golden east. Ten minutes after, the sun- 



A Night among the Pines. 143 

light spread at a gallop along the hillside, scat- 
tering shadows and sparkles, and the day had 
come completely. 

I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle 
the steep ascent that lay before me ; but I had 
something on my mind. It was only a fancy ; 
yet a fancy will sometimes be importunate. I 
had been most hospitably received and punc- 
tually served in my green caravanserai. The 
room was airy, the water excellent, and the 
dawn had called me to a moment. I say 
nothing of the tapestries or the inimitable \ 
ceiling, nor yet of the view which I commanded 
from the windows ; but I felt I was in some 
one's debt for all this liberal entertainment. 
And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing way, 
to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went 
along, until I had left enough for my night's 
lodging. I trust they did not fall to some rich 
and .churlish drover. 



THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS. 



' We travelled in the prbit of olden wars ; 
Yet all the land was green ; 
And love we found ^ and peace. 
Where fire atid war had been. 
They pass and smile, the children of the sword— 
No more the sword they wield ; 
And O, how deep the corn 
Along the battlefield ! ' 

W. P. Bannatynb. 



THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS. 



ACROSS THE LOZERE. 

The track that I had followed in the evening 
soon died out, and I continued to follow over a 
bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such as 
had conducted me across the Goulet. It was 
already warm. I tied my jacket on the pack, 
and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine 
herself was in high spirits, and broke of her 
own accord, for the first time in my experi- 
ence, into a jolting trot that sent the oats 
swashing in the pocket of my coat. The view, 
back upon the northern Gevatidan, extended 
with every step ; scarce a tree, scarce a house, 
appeared upon the fields of wild hill that ran 
north, east, and west, all blue and gold in the 
haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude 



148 The Country of the Camisards, 

of little birds kept sweeping and twittering 
about my path ; they perched on the stone 
pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and 
I saw them circle in volleys in the blue air, and 
show, from time to time, translucent flickering 
wings between the sun and me. 

Almost from the first moment of my march, 
a faint large noise, like a distant surf, had filled 
my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it 
the voice of a neighboring waterfall, and some- 
times a subjective result of the utter stillness of 
the hill. But as I continued to advance, the 
noise increased and became like the hissing of 
an enormous tea-urn, and at the same time 
breaths of cool air began to reach me from the 
direction of the summit. At length I under- 
stood. It was blowing stiffly from the south 
upon the other slope of the Los^re, and every 
step that I took I was drawing nearer to the 
wind. 

Although it had been long desired, it was 



Across the Lozere, 149 

quite unexpectedly at last that my eyes rose 
above the summit. A step that seemed no way 
more decisive than many other steps that had 
preceded it — and, * like stout Cortes when, with 
eagle eyes, he stared on the Pacific,' I took 
possession, in my own name, of a new quarter 
of the world. For behold, instead of the gross 
turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, 
a view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land 
of intricate blue hills below my feet. 

The Lozhe lies nearly east and west, cutting 
Gevatidan into two unequal parts ; its highest 
point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then 
standing, rises upwards of five thousand six 
hundred feet above the sea, and in clear 
weather commands a view over all lower 
Laiignedoc to the Mediterranean Sea. I have 
spoken with people who either pretended or 
believed that they had seen, from the Pic de 
Finiels, white ships sailing by Montpellier and 
Cette. Behind was the upland northern coun- 



150 The Country of the Camisards, 

try through which my way had lain, peopled 
by a dull race, without wood, without much 
grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past 
for little beside wolves. But in front of me, 
half-veiled in sunny haze, lay a new Gevatidan, 
rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. 
Speaking largely, I was in the C^vennes at 
Monastier, and during all my journey ; but there 
is a strict and local sense in which only this 
confused and shaggy country at my feet has 
any title to the name, and in this sense the 
peasantry employ the word. These are the 
Civennes with an emphasis : the Cevennes of the 
Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of 
hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, 
raged for two years between the Grand Mon- 
arch with all his troops and marshals on the 
one hand, and a few thousand Protestant moun- 
taineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty 
years ago, the Camisards held a station even 
on the Lozhe, where I stood ; they had an 



Across the Lozere. 151 

organization, arsenals, a military and religious 
hierarchy ; their affairs were ' the discourse of 
every coffee-house ' in London ; England sent 
fleets in their support ; their leaders prophesied 
and murdered ; with colors and drums, and the 
singing of old French psalms, their bands some 
times affronted daylight, marched before walled 
cities, and dispersed the generals of the king ; 
and sometimes at night, or in masquerade, pos- 
sessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged 
treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon 
their foes. There, a hundred and eighty years 
ago, was the chivalrous Roland, ' Coimt and 
Lord Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants 
:n Francel grave, silent, imperious, pock-marked 
ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his wan- 
derings out of love. There was Cavalier, a 
baker's apprentice with a genius for war, elected 
brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die 
at fifty-five the English governor of Jersey. 
There again was Castanet, a partisan leader 



1 5 2 The Country of the Camisards, 

m a voluminous peruke and with a taste for 
controversial divinity. Strange generals, who 
moved apart to take counsel with the God 
of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sen- 
tinels or slept in an unguarded camp, as the 
Spirit whispered to their hearts ! And there, 
to follow these and other leaders, was the rank 
and file of prophets and disciples, bold, patient, 
indefatigable, hardy to run upon the mountains, 
cheering their rough life with psalms, eager 
to fight, eager to pray, listening devoutly to 
the oracles of brainsick children, and mys- 
tically putting a grain of wheat among the 
pewter balls with which they charged their 
muskets. 

I had travelled hitherto through a dull dis- 
trict, and in the track of nothing more notable 
that the child-eating Beast of G^vaudan, the 
Napolhn Buonaparte of wolves. But now I 
was to go down into the scene of a romantic 
chapter — or, better, a romantic foot-note — in 



Across the Lozere. 153 

the history of the world. What was left of 
all this bygone dust and heroism ? I was told 
that Protestantism still survived in this head 
seat of Protestant resistance; so much the 
priest himself had told me in the monastery 
parlor. But I had yet to learn if it were a 
bare survival, or a lively and generous tradi 
tion. Again, if in the northern Civennes the 
people are narrow in religious judgments, and 
more filled with zeal than charity, what was 
I to look for in this land of persecution and 
reprisal — in a land where the tyranny of the 
Church produced the Camisard rebellion, and 
the terror of the Camisards threw the Cath- 
olic peasantry into legalized revolt upon the 
other side, so that Camisard and Florentin 
skulked for each other's lives among the moun- 
tains } 

Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused 
to look before me, the series of stone pillars 
came abruptly to an end ; and only a little 



1 54 The Country of the Camisards, 

below, a sort of track appeared and began to go 
down a breakneck slope, turning like a cork- 
screw as it went. It led into a valley between 
falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped 
field of corn, and floored further down with 
green meadows. I followed the track with pre- 
cipitation ; the steepness of the slope, the con- 
tinual agile turning of the line of descent, and 
the old unwearied hope of finding something 
new in a new country, all conspired to lend me 
wings. Yet a little lower and a stream began, 
collecting itself together out of many fountains, 
and soon making a glad noise among the hills. 
Sometimes it would cross the track in a bit of 
waterfall, with a pool, in which Modestine re- 
freshed her feet. 

The whole descent is like a dream to me, 
so rapidly was it accomplished. I had scarcely 
left the summit ere the valley had closed round 
my path, and the sun beat upon me, walking 
in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The track 



Across the Lozere, 155 

became a road, and went up and down in easy 
undulations. I passed cabin after cabin, but 
all seemed deserted ; and I saw not a human 
creature, nor heard any sound except that of 
the stream. I was, however, in a different 
country from the day before. The stony skele- 
ton of the world was here vigorously displayed 
to sun and air. The slopes were steep and 
changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, 
well grown, wealthy in leaf, and touched by 
the autumn with strong and luminous colors. 
Here and there another stream would fall in 
from the right or the left, down a gorge of 
snow-white and tumultuary boulders. The river 
in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a 
river, collecting on all hands as it trotted on 
its way) here foamed awhile in desperate rapids, 
and there lay in pools of the most enchanting 
sea-green shot with watery browns. As far as 
I have gone, I have never seen a river of so 
changeful and delicate a hue ; crystal was not 



156 The Country of the Camisards, 

more clear, the meadows were not by half so 
green ; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill 
of longing to be out of these hot, dusty, and 
material garments, and bathe my naked body in 
the mountain air -and water. All the time as 
I went on I never forgot it was the Sabbath ; 
the stillness was a perpetual reminder ; and 
1 heard in spirit the church-bells clamoring all 
over Europe, and the psalms of a thousand 
churches. 

At length a human sound struck upon my 
ear — a cry strangely modulated between pathos 
and derision ; and looking across the valley, I 
saw a little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his 
hands about his knees, and dwarfed to almost 
comical smallness by the distance. But the 
rogue had picked me out as I went down the 
road, from oak-wood on to oak-wood, driving 
Modestme ; and he made me the compliments of 
the new country in this tremulous high-pitched 
salutation. And as all noises are lovely and 



Across the Lozere, 157 

natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming 
through so much clean hill air and crossing all 
the green valley, sounded pleasant to my ear, 
and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the 
river. 

A little after, the stream that I was following 
fell into the Tariiy at Pout de Montvert oi bloody 
memory. 



PONT DE MONTVERT. 



One of the first things I encountered in Poftt de 
Montvert was, if I remember rightly, the Protes- 
tant temple ; but this was but the type of other 
novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a 
town in England from a town in France, or even 
in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you are in 
one country ; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, 
you are as sure that you are in the other. I 
should find it difficult to tell in what particulars 
Po7it de Montvert differed from Monastier or 
Langogne, or even Bleymard; but the difference 
existed, and spoke eloquently to the eyes. The 
place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring river- 
bed, wore an indescribable air of the South. 
All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in 



Pont de Mo}itvert. 159 

the public-house, as all had been Sabbath peace 
among the mountains. There must have been 
near a score of us at dinner by eleven before 
noon ; and after I had eaten and drunken, and 
sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many 
more came dropping in one after another, or by 
twos and threes. In crossing the Lozhe I had 
not only come among new natural features, but 
moved into the territory of a different race. 
These people, as they hurriedly despatched their 
viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, ques- 
tioned and answered me with a degree of intelli- 
gence which excelled all that I had met, except 
among the railway folk at Chasserades, They 
had open telling faces, and were lively both in 
speech and manner. They not only entered 
thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but 
more than one declared, if he were rich enough, 
he would like to set forth on such another. 

Even physically there was a pleasant change. 
I had not seen a pretty woman since I left 



i6o The Country of the Camisards, 

Moiiastier, and there but one. Now of the three 
who sat down with me to dinner, one was cer- 
tainly not beautiful — a poor timid thing of forty, 
quite troubled at this roaring table d'hote^ whom 
I squired and helped to wine, and pledged and 
tried generally to encourage, with quite a con- 
trary effect ; but the other two, both married, 
were both more handsome than the average of 
women. And Clarisse? What shall I say of 
Clarissef She waited the table with a heavy 
placable nonchalance, like a performing cow ; 
her great gray eyes were steeped in amorous 
languor ; her features, although fleshy, were of 
an original and accurate design ; her mouth had 
a curl ; her nostril spoke of dainty pride ; her 
cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It 
was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with 
training, it offered the promise of delicate senti- 
ment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model 
left to country, admirers and a country way of 
thought. Beauty should at least have touched 



Pont de Montvert, i6i 

society •, then, in a moment, it throws off a 
weight that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of 
itself, it puts on an elegance, learns a gait and a 
carriage of the head, and, in a moment, patet dea. 
Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty 
admiration. She took it like milk, without em- 
barrassment or wonder, merely looking at me 
steadily with her great eyes; and I own the 
result upon myself was some confusion. If 
Clarisse could read English, I should not dare 
to add that her figure was unworthy of her face. 
Hers was a case for stays ; but that may per- 
haps grow better as she gets up in years. 

Po7it de Montvert, or GreenJiill Bridge, as we 
might say at home, is a place memorable in the 
story of the Camisards. It was here that the 
war broke out ; here that those southern Cov- 
enanters slew their Archbishop Sharpe. The 
persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthu- 
siasm on the other, are almost equally difficult 
to understand in these quiet modern days, and 



1 62 The Country of the Camisards, 

with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The 
Protestants were one and all beside their right 
minds with zeal and sorrow. They were all 
prophets and prophetesses. Children at the 
breast would exhort their parents to good works. 
* A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke from 
its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly 
and with a loud voice.' Marshal Villars has 
seen a town where all the women ' seemed pos- 
sessed by the devil,' and had trembling fits, and 
uttered prophecies publicly upon the streets. A 
prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at Montpellier 
because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, 
and she declared that she was weeping tears of 
blood for the misfortunes of the Protestants. 
And it was not only women and children. Stal- 
wart dangerous fellows, used to swing the sickle 
or to wield the forest axe, were likewise shaken 
with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with 
sobs and streaming tears. A persecution unsur- 
passed in violence had lasted near a score of 



Pont de Montvert 163 

years, and this was the result upon the perse- 
cuted ; hanging, burning, breaking on the wheel, 
had been vain ; the dragoons had left their 
hoof-marks over all the country-side ; there 
were men rowing in the galleys, and women 
pining in the prisons of the Church ; and not a 
thought was changed in the heart of any upright 
Protestant. 

Now the head and forefront of the persecu- 
tion — after Lamoignon de Bavile — Fraiiqois de 
Langlade du Chayla (pronounced CMild), Arch- 
priest of the C^vejznes and Inspector of Missions 
in the same country, had a house in which he 
sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Mont- 
vert. He was a conscientious person, who seems 
to have been intended by nature for a pirate, and 
now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned 
all the moderation of which he is capable. A 
missionary in his youth in China, he there suf- 
fered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only 
succored and brought back to life by the charity 



164 The Country of the Camisards, 

of a pariah. We must suppose the pariah devoid 
of second sight, and not purposely malicious 
in this act. Such an experience, it might be 
thought, would have cured a man of the desire 
to persecute ; but the human spirit is a thing 
strangely put together ; and, having been a 
Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a Christian 
persecutor. The Work of the Propagation o£ 
the Faith went roundly forward in his hands. 
His house in Pont de Montvert served him as a 
prison. There he plucked out the hairs of the 
beard, and closed the hands of his prisoners 
upon live coals, to convince them that they were 
deceived in their opinions. And yet had not he 
himself tried and proved the inefficacy of these 
carnal arguments among the Boodhists in China f 
Not only was life made intolerable in Lan- 
guedoc, but flight was rigidly forbidden. One 
Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with 
the mountain-paths, had already guided several 
troops of fugitives in safety to Geneva; and on 



Pont de Montvert, 165 

him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of 
women dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil 
hour for himself, laid his hands. The Sunday 
following, there was a conventicle of Protestants 
in the woods of Altefa'ge upon Mount Bough ; 
where there stood up one Segnicr — Spirit vS/- 
gnier, 2iS his companions called him — a wool- 
carder, tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man 
full of prophecy. He declared, in the name of 
God, that the time for submission had gone by, 
and they must betake themselves to arms for the 
deliverance of their brethren and the destruction 
of the priests. 

The next night, 24th yicly, 1702, a sound 
disturbed the Inspector of Missions as he sat in 
his prison-house at Pont de Montvert ; the voices 
of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer 
and nearer through the town. It was ten at 
night ; he had his court about him, priests, sol- 
diers, and servants, to the number of twelve or 
fifteen ; and now dreading the insolence of a 



1 66 The Country of the Camisards, 

conventicle below his very windows, he ordered 
forth his soldiers to report. But the psalm- 
singers were already at his door, fifty strong, led 
by the inspired Segnier, and breathing death. 
To their summons, the archpriest made answer 
like a stout old persecutor, and bade his garrison 
fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for, accord- 
ing to some, it was in this night's work that 
they came by the name) fell at this discharge ; 
his comrades burst in the door with hatchets 
and a beam of wood, overran the lower story 
of the house, set free the prisoners, and finding 
one of them in the vine^ a sort of Scavenger s 
Daughter of the place and period, redoubled in 
fury against Du Chayla, and sought by repeated 
assaults to carry the upper floors. But he, on 
his side, had given absolution to his men, and 
they bravely held the staircase. 

* Children of God,' cried the prophet, 'hold 
your hands. Let us burn the house, with the 
priest and the satellites of Baal' 



Pont de MontverL 167 

The fire caught readily. Out of an upper 
window Dii Chayla and his men lowered them- 
selves into the garden by means of knotted 
sheets ; some escaped across the river under the 
bullets of the insurgents ; but the archpriest 
himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only 
crawl into the hedge. What were his reflections 
as this second martyrdom drew near "i A poor, 
brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his 
duty resolutely according to his light both in 
the Cevennes and C/mta. He found at least one 
telling word to say in his defence ; for when the 
roof fell in and the upbursting flames discovered 
his retreat, and they came and dragged him to 
the public place of the town, raging and calling 
him damned — 'If I be damned,' said he, * why 
should you also damn yourselves } ' 

Here was a good reason for the last ; but in 
the course of his inspectorship he had given 
many stronger which all told in a contrary direc- 
tion ; and these he was now to hear. One by 



1 68 The Country of the Camisards. 

one, Segiiier first, the Camisards drew near and 
stabbed him. ' This,' they said, ' is for my father 
broken on the wheel. This for my brother in 
the galleys. That for my mother or my sister 
imprisoned in your cursed convents.' Each gave 
his blow and his reason ; and then all kneeled 
and sang psalms around the body till the dawn. 
With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away 
towards Fnigh^es, further up the Tarn, to pursue 
the work of vengeance, leaving Die Chaylds 
prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with 
two-and-fifty wounds upon the public place. 

'Tis a wild nighf s work, with its accompani- 
ment of psalms ; and it seems as if a psalm must 
always have a sound of threatening in that town 
upon the Tarn. But the story does not end, 
even so far as concerns Pont de Montvert, with 
the departure of the Camisards. The career of 
SegztierwdiS brief and bloody. Two more priests 
and a whole family at Ladevhe, from the father 
to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders ; 



Pont de Montvert, 169 

and yet he was but a day or two at large, and 
restrained all the time by the presence of the 
soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier 
of fortune, Captain Potd, he appeared unmoved 
before his judges. 

' Your name } ' they asked. 

* Pierre Segider! 

* Why are you called Spirit ? ' 

' Because the Spirit of the Lord is with 
me.' 

'Your domicile.-*' 

' Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven.' 
' Have you no remorse for your crimes .-^ ' 
*I have committed none. My soid is like a 
garden full of shelter and of fotuitains! 

At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, 
he had his right hand stricken from his body, 
and was burned alive. And his soul was like a 
garden ? So perhaps was the soul of Du CJiayla, 
the Christian martyr. And perhaps if you 
could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, 



1 70 The Country of the Camisards, 

our own composure might seem little less sur- 
prising. 

Du Chaylds house still stands, with a new 
roof, beside one of the bridges of the town ; 
and if you are curious you may see the terrace- 
garden into which he dropped. 



IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN. 



A NEW road leads from Pont de Montvert to 
Florae by the valley of the Tarn ; a smooth 
sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the 
summit of the cliffs and the river in the bottom 
of the valley; and I went in and out, as I fol- 
lowed it, from bays of shadow into promontories 
of afternoon sun. This was a pass like that of 
Killiecrajikie ; a deep turning gully in the hills, 
with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse uproar 
far below, and craggy summits standing in the 
sunshine high above. A thin fringe of ash-trees 
ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a ruin ; but 
on the lower slopes, and far up every glen the 
Spanish chestnut-trees stood each four-square 
to heaven under its tented foliage. Some were 



I 72 The Country of the Camisards, 

planted each on its own terrace, no larger than 
a bed ; some, trusting in their roots, found 
strength to grow and prosper and be straight 
and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley ; 
others, where there was a margin to the river, 
stood marshalled in a line and mighty like 
cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew 
most thickly they were not to be thought of as 
a wood, but as a herd of stalwart individuals ; 
and the dome of each tree stood forth separate 
and large, and as it were a little hill, from among 
the domes of its companions. They gave forth 
a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of 
the afternoon ; autumn had put tints of gold 
and tarnish in the green ; and the sun so shone 
through and kindled the broad foliage, that each 
chestnut was relieved against another, not in 
shadow, but in light. A humble sketcher here 
laid down his pencil in despair. 

I wish I could convey a notion of the growth 
of these noble trees ; of how they strike out 



In the Valley of the Tarn, 173 

boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of droop- 
ing foliage like the willow ; of how they stand 
on upright fluted columns like the pillars of a 
church ; or like the olive, from the most shat- 
tered bole can put out smooth and youthful 
shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of 
the old. Thus they partake of the nature of 
many different trees ; and even their prickly 
top-knots, seen near at hand against the sky, 
have a certain palm-like air that impresses the 
imagination. But their individuality, although 
compounded of so many elements, is but the 
richer and the more original. And to look down 
upon a level filled with these knolls of foliage, 
or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts 
cluster * like herded elephants ' upon the spur of 
a mountain, is to rise to higher thoughts of the 
powers that are in Nature. 

Between Mo destine s laggard humor and the 
beauty of the scene, we made little progress all 
that afternoon ; and at last finding the sun, 



174 ^'^^ Country of the Camisards, 

although still far from setting, was already begin- 
ning to desert the narrow valley of the Tarn, I 
began to cast about for a place to camp in. This 
was not easy to find ; the terraces were too nar- 
row, and the ground, where it was unterraced, 
was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I 
should have slipped all night, and awakened 
towards morning with my feet or my head in the 
river. 

After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet 
above the road, a little plateau large enough 
to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by 
the trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. 
Thither, with infinite trouble, I goaded and 
kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I 
hastened to unload her. There was only room 
for myself upon the plateau, and I had to go 
nearly as high again before I found so much as 
standing room for the ass. It was on a heap of 
rolling stones, on an artificial terrace, certainly 
not five feet square in all. Here I tied her to a 



In the Valley of the Tarn. 175 

chestnut, and having given her corn and bread 
and made a pile of chestnut-leaves, of which I 
found her greedy, I descended once more to my 
own encampment. 

The position was unpleasantly exposed. One 
or two carts went by upon the road ; and as 
long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all 
the world like a hunted Camisard, behind my 
fortification of vast chestnut trunk ; for I was 
passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of 
jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw 
that I must be early awake ; for these chestnut 
gardens had been the scene of industry no 
farther gone than on the day before. The slope 
was strewn with lopped branches, and here and 
there a great package of leaves was propped 
against a trunk ; for even the leaves are service- 
able, and the peasants use them in winter by 
way of fodder for their animals. I picked a 
meal in fear and trembling, half lying down to 
hide myself from the road ; and I daresay I was 



176 The Country of the Camisards, 

as much concerned as if I had been a scout 
from Joanis band above upon the Lozere or 
from Salomons across the Tarn in the old times 
of psahn-singing and blood. Or, indeed, perhaps 
more ; for the Camisards had a remarkable con- 
fidence in God ; and a tale comes back into my 
memory of how the Count of Gevaudariy riding 
with a party of dragoons and a notary at his 
saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all 
the country hamlets, entered a valley in the 
woods, and found Cavalier and his men at 
dinner, gayly seated on the grass, and their hats 
crowned with box-tree garlands, while fifteen 
women washed their linen in the stream. Such 
was a field festival in 1703 ; at that date Antony 
Wattean would be painting similar subjects. 

This was a very different camp from that of 
the night before in the cool and silent pine- 
woods. It was warm and even stifling in the 
valley. The shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo 
note of a whistle with a pea in it, rang up from 



. In the Valley of the Tarn. 177 

the riverside before the sun was down. In the 
growing dusk, faint rustlings began to ruii to 
and fro among the fallen leaves ; from time to 
time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would 
fall upon my ear ; and from time to time I 
thought I could see the movement of something 
swift and indistinct between the chestnuts. A 
profusion of large ants swarmed upon the 
ground ; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes 
droned overhead. The long boughs with their 
bunches of leaves hung against the sky Hke 
garlands ; and those immediately above and 
around me had somewhat the air of a trellis 
which should have been wrecked and half over- 
thrown in a gale of wind. 

Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids ; and 
just as I was beginning to feel quiet stealing 
over my limbs, and settling densely on my 
mind, a noise at my head startled me broad 
awake again, and, I will frankly confess it, 
brought my heart into my mouth. It was such 



178 The Country of the Camisards, 

a noise as a person would make scratching 
loudly with a finger-nail, it came from under 
the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and 
it was thrice rejDeated before I had time to sit 
up and turn about. Nothing was to be seen, 
nothing more was to be heard, but a few of 
these mysterious rustlings far and near, and the 
ceaseless accompaniment of the river and the 
frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut 
gardens are infested by rats ; rustling, chirping, 
and scraping were probably all due to these; 
but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, 
and I had to compose myself for sleep, as best 
I could, in wondering uncertainty about my 
neighbors. 

I was wakened in the gray of the morning 
{Monday, ^oth September) by the sound of foot- 
steps not far off upon the stones, and opening 
my eyes, I beheld a peasant going by among 
the chestnuts by a footpath that I had not 
hitherto observed. He turned his head neither 



In the Valley of the Tarn. 1 79 

to the right nor to the left, and disappeared in 
a few strides among the foliage. Here was an 
escape ! But it was plainly more than time 
to be moving. The peasantry were abroad ; 
scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript 
position than the soldiers of Captain Pout to 
an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine with 
what haste I could ; but as I was returning to 
my sack, I saw a man and a boy come down 
the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They 
unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inar- 
ticulate but cheerful sounds, and hurried for- 
ward to get into my gaiters. 

The pair, who seemed to be father and son, 
came slowly up to the plateau, and stood close 
beside me for some time in silence. The bed 
was open, and I saw with regret my revolver 
lying patently disclosed on the blue wool. At 
last, after they had looked me all over, and the 
silence had grown laughably embarrassing, the 
man demanded in what seemed unfriendly 
tones : — 



1 80 The Cotcntry of the Camisards, 

' You have slept here ? ' 
• *Yes/ said I. 'As you see.' 

' Why ? ' he asked. 

* My faith,' I answered lightly, ' I was tired.' 

He next inquired where I was going and what 
I had had for dinner ; and then, without the 
least transition, ' C est bieUy he added. 'Come 
along.' And he and his son, without another 
word, turned off to the next chestnut-tree but 
one, which they set to pruning. The thing had 
passed off more simply than I hoped. He was 
a grave, respectable man ; and his unfriendly 
voice did not imply that he thought he was 
speaking to a criminal, but merely to an inferior. 

I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of 
chocolate and seriously occupied with a case of 
conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodg- 
ing .? I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas 
in the shape of ants, there was no water in the 
room, the very dawn had neglected to call me 
in the morning. I might have missed a train, 



In the Valley of the Tarn, i8i 

had there been any in the neighborhood to 
catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my en- 
tertainment ; and I decided I should not pay 
unless I met a beggar. 

The valley looked even lovelier by morning ; 
and soon the road descended to the level of the 
river. Here, in a place where many straight 
and prosperous chestnuts stood together, making 
an aisle upon a swarded terrace, I made my 
morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It 
was marvellously clear, thrillingly cool ; the 
soap-suds disappeared as if by magic in the 
swift current, and the white boulders gave one a 
model for cleanliness. To wash in one of God's 
rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of 
cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. 
To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may per- 
haps make clean the body ; but the imagination 
takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on 
with a light and peaceful heart, and sang psalms 
to the spiritual ear as I advanced. 



1 82 The Country of the Camisards, 

Suddenly up came an old woman, who point- 
blank demanded alms. 

' Good ! ' thought I ; * here comes the waiter 
with the bill' 

And I paid for my night's lodging on the 
spot. Take it how you please, but this was the 
first and the last beggar that I met with during 
all my tour. 

A step or two farther I was overtaken by an 
old man in a brown nightcap, clear-eyed, weather- 
beaten, with a faint, excited smile. A little girl 
followed him, driving two sheep and a goat ; 
but she kept in our wake, while the old man 
walked beside me and talked about the morning 
and the valley. It was not much past six ; and 
for healthy people who have slept enough, that 
is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful 
talk. 

' Connaissez-vous le Seignetcrf he said at 
length. 

I asked him what Seigneur he meant ; but he 



In the Valley of the Tarn, 183 

only repeated the question with more emphasis 
and a look in his eyes denoting hope and in- 
terest. 

' Ah ! ' said I, pointing upwards, * I under- 
stand you now. Yes, I know Him ; He is the 
best of acquaintances.' 

The old man said he was delighted. * Hold,* 
he added, striking his bosom ; ' it makes me 
happy here.' There were a few who knew the 
Lord in these valleys, he went on to tell me ; 
not many, but a few. 'Many are called,' he 
quoted, * and few chosen.' 

* My father,' said I, ' it is not easy to say who 
know the Lord ; and it is none of our business. 
Protestants and Catholics, and even those who 
worship stones, may know Him and be known 
by Him ; for He has made all' 

I did not know I was so good a preacher. 

The old man assured me he thought as I did, 
and repeated his expressions of pleasure at meet- 
ing me. ' We are so few,' he said. * They call 



184 The Country of tne Camuards, 

us Moravians here ; but down in the department 
of Gard, where there are also a good number, 
they are called Derbists, after an English pastor.' 
I began to understand that I was figuring, in 
questionable taste, as a member of some sect 
to me unknown ; but I was more pleased with 
the pleasure of my companion than embarrassed 
by my own eqaiivocal position. Indeed I can 
see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference ; 
and especially in these high matters, where we 
have all a sufficient assurance that, whoever may 
be in the vv^rong, we ourselves are not completely 
in the right. The truth is much talked about ; 
but this old man in a brown nightcap showed 
himself so simple, sweet, and friendly that I am 
not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He 
was, as a matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. 
Of what that involves in the way of doctrine I 
have no idea nor the time to inform myself ; but 
I know right well that we are all embarked upon 
a troublesome world, the children of one Father, 



In the Valley of the Tarn, 185 

striving in many essential points to do and to 
become the same. And although it was some- 
what in a mistake that he shook hands with me 
so often and showed himself so ready to receive 
my words, that was a mistake of the truth-find- 
ing sort. For charity begins blindfold ; and only 
through a series of similar misapprehensions 
rises at length into a settled principle of love and 
patience, and a firm belief in all our fellow-men. 
If I deceived this good old man, in the like man- 
ner I would willingly go on to deceive others. 
And if ever at length, out of our separate and 
sad ways, we should all come together into one 
common house, I have a hope, to which I cling 
dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will 
hasten to shake hands with me again. 

Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by 
the way, he and I came down upon a hamlet by 
the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called 
La VernMe, with less than a dozen houses, and 
a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here he dwelt ; 



1 86 The Country of the Camisards. 

and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. 
The inn was kept by an agreeable young man, 
a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a 
pretty and engaging girl. The village school- 
master dropped in to speak with the stranger. 
And these were all Protestants — a fact which 
pleased me more than I should have expected ; 
and, what pleased me still more, they seemed 
all upright and simple people. The Plymouth 
Brother hung round me with a sort of yearning 
interest, and returned at least thrice to make 
sure I was enjoying my meal. His behavior 
touched me deeply at the time, and even now 
moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude, 
but he would not willingly forego one moment 
of my society ; and he seemed never weary of 
shaking me by the hand. 

When all the rest had drifted off to their 
day's work, I sat for near half an hour with the 
young mistress of the house, who talked pleas- 
antly over her seam of the chestnut harvest, 



In the Valley of the Tarn. 187 

and the beauties of the Tarn, and old family 
affections, broken up when young folk go from 
home, yet still subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was 
a sweet nature, with a country plainness and 
much delicacy underneath ; and he who takes 
her to his heart will doubtless be a fortunate 
young man. 

The valley below La VernMe pleased me 
more and more as I went forward. Now the 
hills approached from either hand, naked and 
crumbling, and walled in the river between 
cliffs ; and now the valley widened and became 
green. The road led me past the old castle of 
Miral on a steep ; past a battlemented monas- 
tery, long since broken up and turned into a 
church and parsonage ; and past a cluster of 
black roofs, the village of Cocurh, sitting among 
vineyards and meadows and orchards thick with 
red apples, and where, along the highway, they 
were knocking down walnuts from the roadside 
trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. 



1 88 The Country of the Camisards, 

The hills, however much the vale might open, 
were still tall and bare, with cliffy battlements 
and here and there a pointed summit ; and the 
Tarji still rattled through the stones with a 
mountain noise. I had been led, by bagmen of 
a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific 
country after the heart of Byron; but to my 
Scotch eyes it seemed smiling and plentiful, 
as the weather still gave an impression of high 
summer to my Scotch body ; although the chest- 
'luts were already picked out by the autumn, 
and the poplars, that here began to mingle with 
them, had turned into pale gold against the ap- 
proach of winter. 

There was something in this landscape, smil- 
ing although wild, that explained to me the spirit 
of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took 
to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had 
all gloomy and bedevilled thoughts ; for once 
that they received God's comfort they would be 
twice engaged with Satan ; but the Camisards 



In the Valley of the Tarn. 189 

had only bright and supporting visions. They 
dealt much more in blood, both given and taken ; 
yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their 
records. With a light conscience, they pursued 
their life in these rough times and circumstances. 
The soul of Seguier, let us not forget, was like 
a garden. They knew they were on God's side, 
with a knowledge that has no parallel among the 
Scots ; for the Scots, although they might be 
certain of the cause, could never rest confident 
of the person. 

* We flew,' says one old Camisard, ' when we 
heard the sound of psalm-singing, we flew as if 
with wings. We felt within us an animating 
ardor, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot 
be expressed in words. It is a thing that must 
have been experienced to be understood. How- 
ever weary we might be, we thought no more 
of our weariness and grew light, so soon as the 
psalms fell upon our ears.' 

The valley of the Tarn and the people whom 



1 90 The Country of the Camisards. 

I met at La Vernede not only explain to me this 
passage, but the twenty years of suffering which 
those, who were so stiff and so bloody when 
once they betook themselves to war, endured 
with the meekness of children and the constancy 
of saints and peasants. 



FLORAC. 



On a branch of the Tarn stands Florae, the 
seat of a subprefecture, with an old castle, an 
alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and 
a live fountain welling from the hill. It is nota- 
ble, besides, for handsome women, and as one 
of the two capitals, Alais being the other, of the 
country of the Camisards. 

The landlord of the inn took me, after I had 
eaten, to an adjoining caf^, where I, or rather 
my journey, became the topic of the afternoon. 
Every one had some suggestion for my guid- 
ance ; and the subprefectorial map was fetched 
from the subprefecture itself, and much thumbed 
among coffee-cups and glasses of liqueur. Most 
of these kind advisers were Protestant, though 



192 The Country of the Camisards. 

I observed that Protestant and Catholic inter- 
mingled in a very easy manner; and it sur- 
prised me to see what a lively memory still 
subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills 
of the south-west, by Mauckliiie, Cumnock, or 
Carsphairji, in isolated farms or in the manse, 
serious Presbyterian people still recall the days 
of the great persecution, and the graves of local 
martyrs are still piously regarded. But in towns 
and among the so-called better classes, I fear 
that these old doings have become an idle tale. 
If you met a mixed company in the King's 
Arms at Wigtozvn, it is not likely that the talk 
would run on Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of 
Glcnhtce, I found the beadle's wife had not so 
much as heard of Pi'ophet Peden. But these 
Cevenols were proud of their ancestors in quite 
another sense ; the war was their chosen topic ; 
its exploits were their own patent of nobility ; 
and where a man or a race has had but one 
adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and 



Florae, 193 

pardon some prolixity of reference. They told 
me the country was still full of legends hitherto 
uncollected ; I heard from them about Cavalier s 
descendants — not direct descendants, be it 
understood, but only cousins or nephews — who 
were still prosperous people in the scene of the 
boy-general's exploits ; and one farmer had seen 
the bones of old combatants dug up into the 
air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century, in 
a field where the ancestors had fought, and the 
great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching. 

Later in the day one of the Protestant pas- 
tors was so good as to visit me : a young man, 
intelligent and pohte, with whom I passed an 
hour or two in talk. Florae, he told me, is part 
Protestant, part Catholic ; and the difference in 
religion is usually doubled by a difference in 
politics. You may judge of my surprise, com- 
ing as I did from such a babbling purgatorial 
Polajid of a place as Monastiery when I learned 
that the population lived together on very quiet 

13 



194 1^^^^ Country of the Camisards. 

terms ; and there was even an exchange of 
hospitalities between households thus doubly- 
separated. Black Camisard and White Cami- 
sard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon, 
Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the 
White Cross, they had all been sabring and 
shooting, burning, pillaging and murdering, their 
hearts hot with indignant passion ; and here, 
after a hundred and seventy years, Protestant 
is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in 
mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But 
the race of man, like that indomitable nature 
whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its 
own ; the years and seasons bring various 
harvests ; the sun returns after the rain ; and 
mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single 
man awakens from the passions of a day. We 
judge our ancestors from a more divine position ; 
and the dust beinsf a little laid with several 
centuries, we can see both sides adorned with 
human virtues and fighting with a show of right. 



Florae, 195 

I have never thought it easy to be just, and 
find it daily even harder than I thought. I own 
I met these Protestants with deHght and a sense 
of coming home. I was accustomed to speak 
their language, in another and deeper sense of 
the word than that which distinguishes between 
French and English ; for the true babel is a 
divergence upon morals. And hence I could hold 
more free communication with the Protestants, 
and judge them more justly, than the Catholics. 
Father Apollinaris may pair off with my moun- 
tain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and 
devout old men ; yet I ask myself if I had as 
ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist ; 
or had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so 
warmly to the dissenter of La Vernede. With 
the first I was on terms of mere forbearance ; 
but with the other, although only on a misunder- 
standing and by keeping on selected points, it 
was still possible to hold converse and exchange 
some honest thoughts. In this world of imper- 



196 The Country of the Camisards, 

fection we gladly welcome even partial inti- 
macies. If we find but one to whom we can 
speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can 
walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, 
we have no ground of quarrel with the world or 
God. 



IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE. 



On Tuesday, ist October, we left Florae late in 
the afternoon, a tired donkey and tired donkey- 
driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered 
bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of 
the Mirnente. Steep rocky red mountains over- 
hung the stream ; great oaks and chestnuts 
grew upon the slopes or in stony terraces ; here 
and there was a red field of millet or a few 
apple-trees studded with red apples ; and the 
road passed hard by two black hamlets, one 
with an old castle atop to please the heart of 
the tourist. 

It was difficult here again to find a spot fit 
for my encampment. Even under the oaks and 



198 The Country of the Camisards. 

chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid 
slope, but was heaped with loose stones ; and 
where there was no timber the hills descended 
to the stream in a red precipice tufted with 
heather. The sun had left the highest peak 
in front of me, and the valley was full of the 
lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they re- 
called the flocks into the stable, when I spied a 
bight of meadow some way below the roadway 
in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, 
and, tying Modestine provisionally to a tree, pro- 
ceeded to investigate the neighborhood. A gray 
pearly evening shadow filled the glen ; objects 
at a little distance grew indistinct and melted 
bafflingly into each other ; and the darkness was 
rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached 
a great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by 
the river's brink ; when to my disgust the voices 
of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a 
house round the angle on the other bank. I 
had half a mind to pack and be gone again, but 



In tJie Valley of the Mimente, 1 99 

the growing darkness moved me to remain. 
I had only to make no noise until the night 
was fairly come^ and trust to the dawn to 
call me early in the morning. But it was 
hard to be annoyed by neighbors in such a 
great hotel. 

A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. 
Before I had fed Modestine and arranged my 
sack, three stars were already brightly shining, 
and the others were beginning dimly to appear. 
I slipped down to the river, which looked very 
black among its rocks, to fill my can ; and dined 
with a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled 
to light a lantern while so near a house. The 
moon, which I had seen, a pallid crescent, all 
afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the 
hills, but not a ray fell into the bottom of the 
glen where I was lying. The oak rose before 
me like a pillar of darkness ; and overhead the 
heartsome stars were set in the face of the night. 
No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the 



200 The Country of the Camisards, 

French happily put it, a la belle etoile. He may. 
know all their names and distances and magni- 
tudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns 
mankind, their serene and gladsome influence on 
the mind. The greater part of poetry is about 
the stars ; and very justly, for they are them- 
selves the most classical of poets. These same 
far-away worlds, sprinkled like tapers or shaken 
together like a diamond dust upon the sky, had 
looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier^ 
when, in the words of the latter, they had * no 
other tent but the sky, and no other bed than 
my mother earth/ 

All night a strong wind blew up the valley, 
and the acorns fell pattering over me from the 
oak. Yet, on this first night of October, the air 
was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur 
thrown back. 

I was much disturbed by the barking of a 
dog, an animal that I fear more than any wolf. 
A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported 



In the Valley of the Mimente. 201 

by the sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you 
meet with encouragement and praise ; but if you 
kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the 
domestic affections come clamoring round you 
for redress. At the end of a fagging day, the 
sharp, cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a 
keen annoyance ; and to a tramp like myself, 
he represents the sedentary and respectable 
world in its most hostile form. There is some- 
thing of the clergyman or the lawyer about this 
engaging animal ; and if he were not amenable 
to stones, the boldest man would shrink from 
travelling afoot. I respect dogs much in the 
domestic circle ; but on the highway or sleeping 
afield, I both detest and fear them. 
/ I was wakened next morning ( Wednesday, 
^October 2d) by the same dog — for I knew his 
bark — making a charge down the bank, and 
then, seeing me sit up, retreating again with 
great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite ex- 
tinguished, The heaven was of that enchanting 



202 The Country of the Camisards, 

mild gray-blue of the early morn. A still clear 
light began to fall, and the trees on the hillside 
were outlined sharply against the sky. The 
wind had veered more to the north, and no 
longer reached me in the glen ; but as I was go- 
ing on with my preparations, it drove a white 
cloud very swiftly over the hill-top ; and looking 
up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with 
gold. In these high regions of the air, the sun 
was already shining as at noon. If only the 
clouds travelled high enough, we should see the 
same thing all night long. For it is always day- 
light in the fields of space. 

As I began to go up the valley, a draught of 
wind came down it out of the seat of the sunrise, 
although the clouds continued to run overhead 
in an almost contrary direction. A few steps 
farther, and I saw a whole hillside gilded with 
the sun ; and still a little beyond, between two 
peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared 
floating in the sky, and I was once more face to 



hi the Valley of the Mimente, 203 

face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel 
of our system. 

I met but one human being that forenoon, a 
dark military-looking wayfarer, who carried a 
game-bag on a baldric ; but he made a remark 
that seems worthy of record. For when I asked 
him if he were Protestant or Catholic — 

* O,' said he, * I make no shame of my religion. 
I am a Catholic' 

He made no shame of it ! The phrase is a 
piece of natural statistics ; for it is the language 
of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of 
Bavile and his dragoons, and how you may ride 
rough-shod over a religion for a century, and 
leave it only the more lively for the friction. 
Ireland is still Catholic ; the Cevennes still 
Protestant. It is not a basketful of law-papers, 
nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of 
horse, that can change one tittle of a plough- 
man's thoughts. Outdoor rustic people have 
not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy 



204 The Country of the Camisards, 

plants and thrive flourishingly in persecution. 
One who has grown a long while in the sweat of 
laborious noons, and under the stars at night, 
a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest 
countryman, has, in the end, a sense of com- 
munion with the powers of the universe, and 
amicable relations towards his God. Like my 
mountain Plymouth Brother, he knows the Lord. 
His religion does not repose upon a choice of 
logic ; it is the poetry of the man's experience, 
the philosophy of the history of his life. God, 
like a great power, like a great shining sun, has 
appeared to this simple fellow in the course of 
years, and become the ground and essence of 
his least reflections ; and you may change creeds 
and dogmas by authority, or proclaim a new 
religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will ; 
but here is a man who has his own thoughts, 
and Vvdll stubbornly adhere to them in good and 
evil He is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Plym- 
outh Brother, in the same indefeasible sense 



In the Valley of the Mimente, 205 

that a man is not a woman, or a woman not a 
man. For he could not vary^from his faith, 
unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, 
and, in a strict and not a conventional meaning, 
change his mind. 



THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY. 



I WAS now drawing near to Cassagnas^ a cluster 
of black roofs upon the hillside, in this wild 
valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked 
upon in the clear ^ air by many rocky peaks. 
The road along the Mimente is yet new, nor 
have the mountaineers recovered their surprise 
when the first cart arrived at Cassagiias. But 
although it lay thus apart from the current of 
men's business, this hamlet had already made 
a figure in the history of France. Hard by, 
in caverns of the mountain, was one of the five 
arsenals of the Camisards ; where they laid up 
clothes and corn and arms against necessity, 
forged bayonets and sabres, and made them- 
selves gunpowder with willow charcoal and salt- 



The Heart of the Country, 207 

petre boiled in kettles. To the same caves, 
amid this multifarious industry, the sick and 
wounded were brought up to heal ; and there 
they were visited by the two surgeons, Chabrier 
and Tavaii, and secretly nursed by women of 
the neighborhood. 

Of the five legions into which the Camisards 
were divided, it was the oldest and the most 
obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas, 
This was the band of Spirit Segider ; men who 
had joined their voices with his in the 68th 
Psalm as they marched down by night on the 
archpriest of the Cevamcs. Seguici% promoted 
to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon CouderCy 
whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain- 
general to the whole army of the Camisards. 
He was a prophet ; a great reader of the heart, 
who admitted people to the sacrament or refused 
them by * intentively viewing every man ' be- 
tween the eyes ; and had the most of the Scrip- 
tures off by rote. And 'this was surely happy; 



2IO The Country of the Camisards, 

self, I was well looked upon, and my acquaint- 
ance with history gained me farther respect. 
For we had something not unlike a religious 
controversy at table, a gendarme and a mer- 
chant with whom I dined being both strangers to 
the place and Catholics. The young men of the 
house stood round and supported me ; and the 
whole discussion was tolerantly conducted, and 
surprised a man brought up among the infini- 
tesimal and contentious differences of Scotland. 
The merchant, indeed, grew a little warm, and 
was far less pleased than some others with my 
historical acquirements. But the gendarme was 
mighty easy over it all. 

* It 's a bad idea for a man to change,' said 
he ; and the remark was generally applauded. 

That was not the opinion of the priest and 
soldier at our Lady of the Sjiozus. But this 
is a different race ; and perhaps the same great- 
heartedness that upheld them to resist, now 
enables them to differ in a kind spirit. For 



The Heart of the Country. 2 1 1 

courage respects courage ; but where a faith has 
been trodden out, we may look for a mean and 
narrow population. The true work of Bruce 
and Wallace was the union of the nations ; not 
that they should stand apart a while longer, 
skirmishing upon their borders ; but that, when 
the time came, they might unite with self- 
respect. 

The merchant was much interested in my 
journey, and thought it dangerous to sleep 
afield. 

' There are the wolves,' said he ; ' and then it 
is known you are an Englishman. The English 
have always long purses, and it might very well 
enter into some one's head to deal you an ill 
blow some night.' 

I told him I was not much afraid of such 
accidents ; and at any rate judged it unwise to 
dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in 
the arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, 
was a far too risk}- business as a whole to make 



2 1 2 The Country of the Camisards, 

each additional particular of danger worth regard. 
* Something,' said I, * might burst in your inside 
any day of the week, and there would be an end 
of you, if you were locked into your room with 
three turns of the key.' 

* Cependant! said he, ' coitcher dehors ! * 
' God,' said I, ' is everywhere.' 

* Cependant, coucher dehors ! ' he repeated, and 
his voice was eloquent of terror. 

He was the only person, in all my voyage, 
who saw anything hardy in so simple a proceed- 
ing ; although many considered it superfluous. 
Only one, on the other hand, professed much 
delight in the idea ; and that was my Plymouth 
Brother, who cried out, when I told him I 
sometimes preferred sleeping under the stars to 
a close and noisy alehouse, ' Now I see that you 
know the Lord ! ' 

The merchant asked me for one of my cards 
as I was leaving, for he said I should be some- 
thing to talk of in the future, and desired me to 



The Heart of the Country, 213 

make a note of his request and reason ; a desire 
with which I have thus compHed. 

A httle after two I struck across the Mimente, 
and took a rugged path southward up a' hillside 
covered with loose stones and tufts of heather. 
At the top, as is the habit of the country, the 
path disappeared ; and I left my she-ass munch- 
ing heather, and went forward alone to seek a 
road. 

I was now on the separation of two vast 
watersheds ; behind me all the streams were 
bound for the Garo7i7te and the Western Ocean ; 
before me was the basin of the Rhone. Hence, 
as from the Lozhe, you can see in clear weather 
the shining of the Gidf of Lyons ; and perhaps 
from here the soldiers of Salomon may have 
watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovely 
and the long-promised aid from England. You 
may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the 
country of the Camisards ; four of the five legions 
camped all round it and almost within view — 



214 ^'^^ Country of the Cami sards, 

Salomon and Joani to the north, Castanet and 
Roland to the south ; and when Jidien had 
finished his famous work, the devastation of tlie 
High Cevennes, which lasted all through October 
and November, 1703, and during which four 
hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, 
with fire and pickaxe, utterly subverted, a man 
standing on this eminence would have looked 
forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled 
land. Time and man's activity have now 
repaired these ruins ; Cassagnas is once more 
roofed and sending up domestic smoke ; and in 
the chestnut gardens, in low and leafy corners, 
many a prosperous farmer returns, when the 
day's work is done, to his children and bright 
hearth. And still it was perhaps the wildest 
view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain 
upon chain of hills ran surging southward, chan- 
nelled and sculptured by the winter streams, 
feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and 
here and there breaking out into a coronal of 



The Heart of the Country, 215 

cliffs. The sun, which was still far from setting, 
sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but 
the valleys were already plunged in a profound 
and quiet shadow. 

A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of 
sticks, and wearing a black cap of hberty, as if 
in honor of his nearness to the grave, directed 
me to the road for St, Germain de Calberte. 
There was something solemn in the isolation of 
this infirm and ancient creature. Where he 
dwelt, how he got upon this high ridge, or how 
he proposed to get down again, were more than 
I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was 
the famous Plan de Font Morte, where Poul 
with his Armenian sabre slashed down the 
Camisards of Siguier. This, methought, might 
be some Rip van Winkle of the war, who had 
lost his comrades, fleeing before Potd, and wan- 
dered ever since upon the mountains. It might 
be news to him that Cavalier had surrendered, 
or Roland had fallen fighting with his back 



2i6 The Country of the Camisards, 

against an olive. And while I was thus work- 
ing on my fancy, I heard him hailing in broken 
tones, and saw him waving me to come back 
with one of hi? -^wo sticks. I had already got 
some way past him ; but, leaving Modestine once 
more, retraced my steps. 

Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The 
old gentleman had forgot to ask the pedler what 
he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect. 

I told him sternly, ' Nothing.' 

' Nothing } ' cried he. 

I repeated * Nothing,' and made off. 

It 's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became 
as inexplicable to the old man as he had been 
to me. 

The road lay under chestnuts, and though I 
saw a hamlet or two below me in the vale, and 
many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it 
was a very solitary march all afternoon ; and the 
evening began early underneath the trees. But 
I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, 



The Heart of the Country, 2 1 7 

old, endless ballad not far off. It seemed to be 
about love and a bcl aniotircux, her handsome 
sweetheart ; and I wished I could have taken up 
the strain and answered her, as I went on upon 
my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa 
in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What 
could I have told her t Little enough ; and yet 
all the heart requires. How the world gives 
and takes away, and brings sweethearts near, 
only to separate them again into distant and 
strange lands ; but to love is the great amulet 
which makes the world a garden ; and * hope, 
which comes to all,' outwears the accidents of 
life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond 
the grave and death. Easy to say : yea, but 
also, by God's mercy, both easy and grateful to 
believe ! 

We struck at last into a wide white high-road, 
carpeted with noiseless dust. The night had 
come ; the moon had been shining for a long 
while upon the opposite mountain ; when on 



2 1 8 The Country of the Camtsards. 

turning a corner my donkey and I issued our- 
selves into her light. I had emptied out my 
brandy at Florae, for I could bear the stuff no 
longer, and replaced it with some generous and 
scented Volnay ; and now I drank to the moon's 
sacred majesty upon the road. It was but a 
couple of mouthfuls ; yet I became thenceforth 
unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed 
with luxury. Even Modestiiie was inspired by 
this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred 
her little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The 
road wound and descended swiftly among masses 
of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and 
flowed away. Our two shadows — mine deformed 
with the knapsack, hers comically bestridden by 
the pack — now lay before us clearly outlined on 
the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went 
off into the ghostly distance, and sailed along 
the mountainlike clouds. From time to time a 
warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all 
the chestnuts dangling their bunches of foliage 



The Heart of the Country. 219 

and fruit ; the ear was filled with whispering 
music, and the shadows danced in tune. And 
next moment the breeze had gone by, and in all 
the valley nothing moved except our travelling 
feet. On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs 
and gullies of the mountain were faintly designed 
in the moonshine ; and high overhead, in some 
lone house, there burned one lighted window, 
one square spark of red in the huge field of sad 
nocturnal coloring. 

At a certain point, as I went downward, turn- 
ing many acute angles, the moon disappeared 
behind the hill ; and I pursued my way in great 
darkness, until another turning shot me with- 
out preparation into St. Germai7i de Calberte. 
The place was asleep and silent, and buried in 
opaque night. Only from a single open door, 
some lamplight escaped upon the road to 
show me I was come among men's habitations. 
The two last gossips of the evening, still 
talking by a garden wall, directed me to the 



2 20 The Country of the Camisards, 

inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to 
bed ; tlie fire was already out, and had, not 
without grumbhng, to be rekindled ; half an 
hour later, and I must have gone supperless to 
roost. 



THE LAST DAY. 



When I awoke (Thursday, 2d October), and, 
hearing- a great flourishing of cocks and chuck- 
ling of contented hens, betook me to the window 
of the clean and comfortable room where I had 
slept the night, I looked forth on a sunshiny 
morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It 
was still early, and the cockcrows, and the slant- 
ing lights, and the long shadows encouraged me 
to be out and look round me. 

St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine 
leagues round about. At the period of the wars, 
and immediately before the devastation, it was 
inhabited by two hundred and seventy- five fami- 
lies, of which only nine were Catholic ; and it 
took the ctir^ seventeen September days to go 



2 22 The Country of the Camisards, 

from house to house on horseback for a census. 
But the place itself, although capital of a canton, 
is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies terraced 
across a steep slope in the midst of mighty 
chestnuts. The Protestant chapel stands below 
upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town is the 
quaint old Catholic church. 

It was here that poor Dit Chayla, the Chris- 
tian martyr, kept his library and held a court of 
missionaries ; here he had built his tomb, think- 
ing to lie among a grateful population whom he 
had redeemed from error; and hither on the 
morrow of his death they brought the body, 
pierced with two-and-fifty wounds, to be interred. 
Clad in his priestly robes, he was laid out in 
state in the church. The ctury taking his text 
from Second Samuel, twentieth chapter and 
twelfth verse, ' And Amasa wallowed in his 
blood in the highway,' preached a rousing ser- 
mon, and exhorted his brethren to die each at 
his post, like their unhappy and illustrious su- 



The Last Day, 223 

perior. In the midst of this eloquence there 
came a breeze that Spirit Segiiicr was near at 
hand ; and behold ! all the assembly took to 
their horses' heels, some east, some west, and 
the cure himself as far as Alais. 

Strange was the position of this Httle Catho- 
lic metropolis, a thimbleful of Rome, in such a 
wild and contrary neighborhood. On the one 
hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from 
Cassagnas ; on the other, it was cut off from 
assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialct. 
The cnrey Lonvrelenil, although he took a panic 
at the archpriest's funeral, and so hurriedly 
decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated 
pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against 
the crimes of the Protestants. Salomon be- 
sieged the village for an hour and a half, but was 
beat back. The militiamen, on guard before the 
cure's door, could be heard, in the black hours, 
singing Protestant psalms and holding friendly 
talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, 



224 ^^^^ Country of the Camisards, 

although not a shot had been fired, there would 
not be a round of powder in their flasks. Where 
was it gone ? All handed over to the Camisards 
lor a consideration. Untrusty guardians for an 
isolated priest ! 

That these continual stirs were once busy in 
St. Germain de Calberte, the imagination with 
difficulty receives ; all is now so quiet, the pulse 
of human life now beats so low and still in this 
hamlet of the mountains. Boys followed me a 
great way off, like a timid sort of lion-hunters ; 
and people turned round to have a second look, 
or came out of their houses, as I went by. My 
passage was the first event, you would have fan- 
cied, since the Camisards. There was nothing 
rude or forward in this observation ; it was but 
a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that of 
oxen or the human infant ; yet it wearied my 
spirits, and soon drove me from the street. 

I took refuge on the terraces, which are here 
greenly carpeted with sward, and tried to imitate 



The Last Day, 225 

with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of the 
chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. 
Ever and again a little wind went by, and the 
nuts dropped all around me, with a light and 
dull sound, upon the sward. The noise was as 
of a thin fall of great hailstones ; but there went 
with it a cheerful human sentiment of an ap 
proaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their 
gains. Looking up, I could see the brown nut 
peering through the husk, which was already 
gaping ; and between the stems the eye em 
braced an amphitheatre of hill, sunlit and green 
with leaves. 

I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. 
I moved in an atmosphere of pleasure, and felt 
light and quiet and content. But perhaps it 
was not the place alone that so disposed my 
spirit. Perhaps some one was thinking of me 
in another country ; or perhaps some thought of 
my own had come and gone unnoticed, and yet 
done me good. For some thoughts, which sure 
15 



226 The Country of the Camisards, 

would be the most beautiful, vanish before we 
can rightly scan their features ; as though a 
god, travelling by our green highways, should 
but ope the door, give one smiling look into the 
house, and go again forever. Was it Apollo, 
or Mercury, or Love with folded wings ? Who 
shall say ? But we go the lighter about oui 
business, and feel peace and pleasure in our 
hearts. 

I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed 
in the condemnation of a young man, a Catholic, 
who had married a Protestant girl and gone over 
to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born 
they could understand and respect ; indeed, they 
seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic 
woman, who told me that same day there was 
no difference between the two sects, save that 
'wrong was more wrong for the Catholic,' who 
had more light and guidance ; but this of a 
man's desertion filled them with contempt. 

* It is a bad idea for a man to change,' said one. 



The Last Day, 227 

It may have been accidental, but you see how 
this phrase pursued me ; and for myself, I be- 
lieve it is the current philosophy in these parts. 
I have some difficulty in imagining a better. 
It 'snot only a great flight of confidence for a 
man to change his creed and go out of nis family 
for heaven's sake ; but the odds are — nay, and 
the hope is — that, with all this great transition 
in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself 
a hair's-breadth to the eyes of God. Honor to 
those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it 
argues something narrow, whether of strengtji 
or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, 
in those who can take a sufficient interest in 
such infinitesimal and human operations, or who 
can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of 
the mind. And I think I should not leave my 
old creed for another, changing only words for 
other words ; but by some brave reading, em- 
brace it in spirit and truth, and find wrong as 
wrong for me as for the best of other com- 
munions. 



2 28 The Country of the Camisards, 

The phylloxera was in the neighborhood ; and 
instead of wine we drank at dinner a more 
economical juice of the grape — la Parisieiine, 
they call it. It is made by putting the fruit 
whole into a cask with water; one by one the 
berries ferment and burst ; what is drunk during 
the day is supplied at night in water ; so, with 
ever another pitcher from the well, and ever 
another grape exploding and giving out its 
strength, one cask of Parisienne may last a 
family till spring. It is, as the reader will anti- 
cipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to 
the taste. 

What with dinner and coffee, it was long past 
three before I left St. Germain de Calberte. I 
went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great 
glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through 
St. Etietme de Vallee Frangaise, or Val Fran- 
cesque, as they used to call it ; and towards 
evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. 
It was a long and steep ascent. Behind me an 



The Last Day, 229 

empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Card 
kept hard upon my tracks, and near the summit 
overtook me. The driver, hke the rest of the 
world, was sure I was a pedler ; but, unhke oth- 
ers, he was sure of what I had to sell. He had 
noticed the blue wool which hung out of my 
pack at either end ; and from this he had de 
cided, beyond my power to alter his decision, 
that I dealt in blue-wool collars, such as decorate 
the neck of the French draught-horse. 

I had hurried to the topmost powers of 
Modesthie, for I dearly desired to see the view 
upon the other side before the day had faded. 
But it was night when I reached the summit ; 
the moon was riding high and clear ; and only a 
few gray streaks of twilight lingered in the west. 
A yawning valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like 
a hole in created nature at my feet ; but the out- 
line of the hills was sharp against the sky. 
There was Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Cas- 
tanet. And Castanet, not only as an active 



230 The Country of the Camisards, 

undertaking leader, deserves some mention 
among Camisards ; for there is a spray of rose 
among his laurel ; and he showed how, even in 
a public tragedy, love will have its way. In the 
high tide of war he married, in his mountain 
citadel, a young and pretty lass called Mariette. 
There were great rejoicings ; and the bride- 
groom released five-and-twenty prisoners in 
honor of the glad event. Seven months after- 
wards Mariette, the Princess of the CevemieSy as 
they called her in derision, fell into the hands of 
the authorities, where it was like to have gone 
hard with her. But Castanet was a man of exe- 
cution, and loved his wife. He fell on Val- 
leraitgue, and got a lady there for a hostage; 
and for the first and last time in that war there 
was an exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, 
pledge of some starry night upon Mount Aigoal, 
has left descendants to this day. 

Modestine and I — it was our last meal to- 
gether — had a snack upon the top of St. Pierre, 



The Last Day, 231 

I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the 
moonlight and decorously eating bread out of 
my hand. The poor brute would eat more 
heartily in this manner ; for she had a sort of 
affection for me, which I was soon to betray. 

It was a long descent upon St, Jean dtt Gard, 
and we met no one but a carter, visible afar off 
by the glint of the moon on his extinguished 
lantern. 

Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at 
supper; fifteen miles and a stiff hill in little 
beyond six hours ! 



FAREWELL, MODESTINE ! 



On examination, on the morning of October 2)d, 
Mo destine was pronounced unfit for travel. She 
would need at least two days' repose according 
to the ostler ; but I was now eager to reach 
Alais for my letters ; and, being in a civilized 
country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell 
my lady-friend and be off by the diligence that 
afternoon. Our yesterday's march, with the 
testimony of the driver who had pursued us up 
the long hill of St. Pierre, spread a favorable 
notion of my donkey's capabilities. Intending 
purchasers were aware of an unrivalled oppor- 
tunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five 
francs; and before noon, after a desperate en- 
gagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for five-and- 



Farewell, Modes line / 233 

thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but 
I had bought freedom into the bargain. 

St. yeaji du Card is a large place and largely 
Protestant. The maire, a Protestant, asked 
me to help him in a small matter which is 
itself characteristic of the country. The young 
women of the Cevcnnes profit by the common 
religion and the difference of the language to 
go largely as governesses into England ; and 
here was one, a native of Mialet, struggling with 
English circulars from two different agencies 
in London. I gave what help I could ; and vol- 
unteered some advice, which struck me as being 
excellent. 

One thing more I note. The phylloxera has 
ravaged the vineyards in this neighborhood ; 
and in the early morning, under some chestnuts 
by the river, I found a party of men working 
with a cider-press. I could not at first make 
out what they were after, and asked one fellow 
to explain. 



2 34 ^'^^ Country of the Camisards, 

' Making cider/ he said. * Oui, dest comme ga, 
Comme dans le 7iord ! ' 

There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice : 
the country was going to the devil. 

It was not until I was fairly seated by the 
driver, and rattling through a rocky valley with 
dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereave- 
ment. I had lost Modestine, Up to that moment 
I had thought I hated her; but now she was 
gone, 

* And, o, 

The difference to me I * 

For twelve days we had been fast companions ; 
we had travelled upwards of a hundred and 
twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, 
and jogged along with our six legs by many 
a rocky and many a boggy by-road. After the 
first day, although sometimes I was hurt and 
distant in manner, I still kept my patience; 
and as for her, poor soul ! she had come to 
regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of 



Farewell, Modes tine I 235 

my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the 
color of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. 
Her faults were those of her race and sex ; her 
virtues were her own. Farewell, and if forever — 
Father Adam wept when he sold her to me ; 
after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted 
to follow his example ; and being alone with a 
stage-driver and four or five agreeable young 
men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion. 



THE END. 






h 
^ 



